Page 5721 – Christianity Today (2024)

AN INTERVIEW

Question. How has your life changed since you discovered the Total Woman principles? First you put them into practice yourself. Then you began to share them with others in the Total Woman program. And then the book skyrocketed the thing.

Answer. I’m a very home-oriented person. I mean, I’m a wife and mother first and foremost, and I am determined to keep my priorities in order to meet the needs of my family and myself. This career that has now been thrust upon me requires a lot of time, but it’s last on my priority list. So I work a lot harder.

Q. Do you limit the number of weeks you’re out traveling and giving lectures?

A. I don’t travel very much. Last year I went on a seventeen-city promotional campaign for Pocket Books, and I’ll never do that again! It’s just too much time away from home. So now I teach my classes twice a year, two days at a time, for a total of four days away from home. I also have teachers who are out teaching Total Woman classes.

‘My career as president of Total Woman is last on my list of priorities. First and foremost I am a wife and mother.’

Q. Your husband is your business manager and the vice-president of Total Woman, Incorporated. Does this contradict what your book is saying?

A. In what way?

Q. Because you stress the wife’s home orientation and the husband’s headship. Normally a business manager works under the person for whom he or she is working.

A. Charlie and I are a team, and he definitely is my leader. He’s my husband and he’s the head of the family. But I never did say that women shouldn’t go out to work. It’s my personal conviction that a woman should not work if she has little children, because I think they need their mommy right there at home, and I really feel that being a home executive is a full-time job. However, some women who are well educated and have great energy can combine a home and a career. Not everybody can. I can’t say who can and who can’t. But I think if a woman is married, her home life definitely takes priority over her career. In my case, the career is shared with Charlie, who carries the brunt of the heavy work, and I have the joy of talking to women—which is not even a job to me.

Q. So making a home should be a married woman’s first priority?

A. I believe that if a woman gets married, by an act of her will she’s taking on this responsibility. For her to shirk it in order to pursue her career is very sad.

Q. Do you get static on this from the women who come to your classes?

A. I would say most women who hold a strong contrary opinion do not come. We’ve had a number of “liberated women,” and they’re very pleased. One woman who was a member of the NOW group in her area said, “Why, this is exactly what we’re promoting—getting organized, expressing yourself, and being your own person. You just say it a little bit differently than I do!” Who can knock getting organized and developing yourself to the very best? Some women who have had a bitter marital relationship feel burned, so they’re not going to embrace the principle of adapting to your husband very readily. But most women come because they want to learn something.

Q. Couldn’t you say the same thing about your husband—that his first responsibility is also the home and that his relationship with you is more important than his career?

A. I said that for six and a half years. I told him every chance I had, “Charlie, I am number one, and you should do thus and so.” But as I understand it, a man wants his family, and he wants to come home to his haven, but in his manly heart is a drive to excel and to create. It’s not that the family is second; it’s just that it’s over there. At first I was jealous of that. I’m not anymore. I know he loves me, but he loves his job, too. I mean, he’s an aggressive man.

Q. In some households the woman has a career while the man is a “househusband” and takes care of the home. Do you think that this is inappropriate?

A. It’s a free country. But I do think that arrangement is inappropriate, because the Bible says for wives to be “keepers at home” (Titus 2:4, 5). Paul did not say, “Husbands, be keepers at home.” The Scripture teaches that women are to be responsible wives and mothers and to make a home. I love doing it! But some women don’t. They don’t want to make meals. They don’t want to clean the house. They don’t want to raise kids. That’s fine. They don’t have to.

Q. But then they shouldn’t get married?

A. That’s right. Unless they find a man who just adores doing all those wifely things.

Q. What about couples who decide not to have children? Should marriage always imply child-rearing?

A. Oh, no. I don’t think that. If people don’t want to have children, that’s their privilege. I just feel that if a couple decide they do want children, they’re responsible for them.

Q. Do you think that after the children are a certain age the woman should feel free to take a job outside the home?

A. Sure, if she wants to. Some women don’t want to, and it’s very sad that the propaganda from women’s magazines is insinuating that she doesn’t have a brain or that she’s put it on a shelf or that she’s a non-person because she enjoys making a home. I resent that. On the other hand, if a woman has the knowledge to give the world a Salk vaccine, she should do it. But not at the expense of her family.

Q. How old do you think children should be before the mother takes a job outside the home?

A. I really don’t know. My children are six and eleven. My friends who have teen-agers say that they are more needed in the home now than they were when their children were little, that the mother’s presence in the home is very much needed as the kids get older. I believe that’s true.

Q. The percentage of working women in America seems to be continually increasing.

A. I think that there is a great pressure on women today to get out into the business world and get a job and there find salvation. The women I’ve talked to who are out on a nine-to-five job and whose little kids may be going to pot say they’ve found that the answer is not necessarily there. Nor is the answer necessarily staying home and doing the laundry. We know that the answer is in Jesus Christ. And I think he calls us to be responsible wherever we are. I think the issue is not whether the woman should go out to work or not but whether her priorities are in order. I was not working when I first married Charlie, but I was out doing a lot of philanthropic things and involved in a lot of activities and by 4:30 in the afternoon I was just cross-eyed, I was so tired. When he came home, I was grouchy. My priorities were all turned around. First of all, I’m a person responsible to God, and if I go to him first and get squared away with him in the morning. I’ve got his power flowing through me. And secondly. I’m a partner to Charlie; if I meet his needs and then my children’s needs as a parent (my third priority), then I’ve got energy and ability to tackle that fourth priority, the public and my profession.

Q. A lot of women and men feel that the cost of living requires two incomes in many households. Many people can’t afford to buy a home, for instance, with just the husband’s income. Could a woman who has to go out to work still apply your principles if she kept her priorities in order?

A. Sure. I think the principles apply whether you work outside your home or not. However, I think Americans are accustomed to many things that are not necessities but luxuries. And though many families have two incomes, many don’t. A lot of women are just bored with the diapers and the routine, and they want to get out of the home. You can’t generalize. But the whole emphasis of Total Woman is attitude. If I work outside the home and come home as a grouch, things aren’t going to be steady and serene in my household. But if I come home and have a good attitude and am cheerful—that’s going to make for a nice evening. So whether you work or not, you can be cheery. And if you work outside your home, the principle of organization comes into play.

Q. Couldn’t many of your principles be turned around and applied to the husband? Husbands come home grouchy. And the husband’s primary commitment to the family is as important as the wife’s. Aren’t you simply saying that there are Christian principles that teach you to have concern for the other person above your own concerns? Is it uniquely the woman’s responsibility to feel this way?

A. No, it isn’t uniquely her responsibility. What you just said is the whole essence: “preferring one another” (Rom. 12:10). It’s the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As a woman writing to women, naturally I said, “Look, you have the power to swing things around. You have the power to set a good atmosphere.” Recently I met a young man who had read the book and thought, “Hey, I ought to do this for my wife!” So he decided that he was going to get a good atmosphere going. Whichever one does it, it’s super that one did it. The principles I talk about are not really Total Woman principles; they’re just good manners.

Q. You give the impression that it’s the woman’s responsibility to subject herself to her husband and submit her concerns to his. On the other hand, you say things that indicate that husbands should adapt themselves to their wives as well. In Ephesians 5:21 Paul prefaces the passage about wives being in subjection to their husbands by the statement, “Be subject to one another in the Lord.”

A. You’re right. But I knew how a woman reacts. If I had said, “Be subject one to another,” she would have said, “Got that, Harry?” It wouldn’t have worked. She would have missed it, and she would have put it right back on his back. And some women are married to men who don’t care anymore.

Q. Total Woman was originally intended for the non-Christian reader, not for the Christian, was it not?

A. Totally. It was directed to a friend of mine who doesn’t even believe there’s a God. My whole purpose was to get her attention so that I could help her to find life.

Q. Even though it was written for non-Christians, the Christian public soon caught on. Christian bookstores began selling it, though some stowed it under the counter. It’s more explicit about sex than most evangelical books are—or at least used to be. What has the reaction been?

A. For two and a half years I taught Total Woman classes before the book came out. I never dreamed of writing a book; I was just telling everybody what I knew. My classes were in Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches, Methodist churches, all sorts of churches. I think here and there there might have been a little old lady who said, “Naughty, naughty!” But most women just loved it. And their husbands would smile at me in church or call me on the phone and say, “Thank you!”

Q. In your book you stress the importance of sex in marriage. Husband and wives are to enjoy it. Does anything go, so to speak, as long as it is within the bonds of marriage? Some have understood you to imply this and have taken strong exception to the idea.

A. I’m not a doctor or a psychologist or a theologian. All I know is that the Bible says “marriage is honorable in all and the bed undefiled” (Heb. 13:4). How can I add to that? I mean, it’s right there—“the bed undefiled.” I believe that God wants sex between a man and his wife to be enjoyable and thrilling. His complete blessing and sanction is on the sex act—in marriage—and that’s about all I can say.

Q. You quote Ann Landers as saying, “When a marriage goes on the rocks, the rocks are usually in the mattress.” You seem to say that sex is the most important factor for preserving the marriage and giving satisfaction. Is it really the most important?

A. There are many couples who probably have a super-duper sex relationship but whose marriage breaks up. Sex alone is not going to hold it together. Only God can hold two people together. If you have two egos clashing, sooner or later one’s going to say “So long!” and take off on his own. Only the Lord can weld two egos into one. It isn’t that sex holds it together. But sex is very, very important. Let’s say a man and woman have everything else going really great for them—they’re both believers and everything else is right—but their sex relationship is poor or even nonexistent. I think that union is headed for trouble. I know for a fact that some Christian women become so spiritually minded that they say, “Well, I have risen above that!” They get so absorbed in the Scriptures that they don’t meet their husbands’ sexual needs anymore. That kind of marriage is headed for trouble.

Q. Do some women who attend the seminars or write to you feel they are not supposed to enjoy sex?

A. Scores. It’s a major problem. Many women need permission in their brain to accept sex as God’s gift. I have had so many Christian women come to me and say, “My mother told me it was dirty all my life, you know, and suddenly I got married, and I was supposed to change gears but couldn’t. But I realize now that God ordained this and that he desires for us to have a wonderful union.” Now they’re freed up.

Q. The climate of opinion is increasingly in favor of premarital intercourse. How do we prepare our children for the pressures they will face as teen-agers without seeming to endorse the world’s approach?

A. Someone has said that the best sex education a child can have is to see a loving relationship between his mother and father, to see them show their affection—discreetly, of course. When I was growing up I never saw a good marriage. And I think a lot of young people think, “I won’t get married because my parents are miserable, but I will certainly have fun as far as sex goes.” As for verbal sex education: my eleven-year-old knows all about sex. I am sad that it has to be this way—here she is, just a child. But I’ve told her because I want her to hear in a wholesome manner how God planned for men and women to love one another and out of that love union to bring children into the world. I tell her all the facts and hope that, because she has Christ in her, she will want to obey him and go his way.

Q. You speak about this “wonderful relationship” that husbands and wives are supposed to have and the “wonderful relationship” you have with Charlie. Do you have any problems?

Unless a man adores doing wifely things—cooking, cleaning, raising kids—a woman should be the homekeeper.

A. Sure do. Every day. Life is a struggle. You can tell I’m a real loudmouth, and my ego wants to do it my way. So of course we have problems. He’s a wonderful man, and maybe I don’t have as many problems as some women; but life is full of problems. It’s certainly not paradise in our house, but it’s miles closer than it used to be. I think we would have always stayed together, because he’s a fine Christian and wouldn’t have wanted to divorce me. But in his heart he might have divorced me, because I was badgering him to death.

Q. You were married six years before you discovered these principles?

A. Yes. I nagged Charlie for about six and a half years. Then one night I realized that I couldn’t change him and that I was silly to keep trying. I could only change myself. And I got all excited inside thinking what a fantastic challenge lay ahead of me. I was really determined to get to work on it. Over a period of about a year, a complete turnaround took place in our marriage.

Q. So it didn’t happen overnight?

A. No. However, the first week, when I stopped nagging him and began to accept him just as he was, I saw some dramatic results. He began to talk to me when he came in the door at night. He began to be romantic. And when we passed each other in the house, he would smile at me. So that first week really stunned me.

Q. How do you answer the charge that you encourage women to use their weakness to manipulate men? That you give in to Charlie so that ultimately you get your own way?

A. Some people have thought of Total Woman as just a manipulative tool. It depends upon your motive. Two women can do the same thing, like making lovely meals for their husbands, for vastly different reasons. One woman is thinking, I’ll make him a nice fried-chicken dinner because I’m going to ask him for fifty dollars tonight. It’s all wrong, and chances are he will see that as soon as she asks him. If you’re giving to get, that’s manipulation, and it won’t work. But in Total Woman, I point out that you must give with no thought that you’re going to get in return. It just means giving because you love the guy. I don’t think husbands can resist that kind of love. They’re going to want to give love back in kind.

A Right To Know

I love television newsmen. They’re loving. Courteous. Kind. Most of them are real Boy Scouts. I think they were particularly impressive on the night President Ford won the Republican nomination. The three major TV networks were furiously trying to out-hustle and out-story the others, and finally one reporter scored. He stuck a microphone in front of Howard Baker as he and his family were leaving their hotel for the arena. After a couple of general questions, the media star asked Baker in front of his wife and kids to comment on his wife’s drinking problem.

If I’d been he, I might have lost my cool, stuffed the microphone down the reporter’s throat, and given him a serious drinking problem. But Baker remained calm. The newsman then concluded this sensitive piece of reporting by asking Mrs. Baker to comment on her problem. I turned to another channel.

On the late news, Dr. Renee Richards, the eye doctor who had undergone “sexual reassignment” from a man to a woman, was being interviewed. Reporters had discovered her secret and felt they had a right to know because Dr. Richards had become a public figure. They decided she had become a public figure when she won a local tennis tournament for women. Renee explained that she had begged a newsman not to divulge the information for the sake of her family. But the newsman had, and now Renee wanted to clarify a few things. Her two big points were: She was now a woman, and she had not undergone the change to become a woman’s tennis champ at the age of forty-one. But that wasn’t enough. An ace reporter asked, “Did you ever father a child when you were a man?”

That did it. I shut off the set.

What right does a reporter have to ask a woman about her former drinking problem before millions of people? And what right does some journalist have to ask a woman who had undergone a radical change about her former sex life?

But I’m sure this is just the beginning. Soon standard questions for presidential candidates will be: “How often do you have sexual relations with your wife?” “Have you ever suffered from hemorrhoids?” “Was Preparation H effective?”

And we’ll listen eagerly. Because after all, they are public figures, and we do have a right to know.

EUTYCHUS VII

Postscripts On Hunger

Thank you for your magazine’s excellent presentation of the world’s greatest social problem today: hunger (July 16). I especially appreciated Stanley C. Baldwin’s article, “A Case Against Waste and Other Excesses.” I have only one disagreement with this issue. I feel the writers approached the problem with a cavalier “Robin Hood” attitude that nearly totally disregarded the consequence of sin in our poor, cursed world. Economic factors prevent taking food from U.S. producers and giving it to underdeveloped countries because someone has to pay the producer. The only answer would be the nationalization of our food industries so that the government would take the loss of unsold produce. I, for one, would be directly opposed to any more government extension into private industry; therefore it seems to me the problem is unsolvable by human means.

JERRY D. SCOTT II

Associate Pastor

Washington Assembly of God Church

Washington, N.J.

I am pleased that you presented the articles on hunger and sharing. The writers, however, did not face reality when they chose to skirt the facts of our present hoard of grain. For instance, as of June 1, 1976, more than 650 million bushels of wheat were held over from the 1974 and 1975 harvests.… These commodities are trapped in storage by three embargoes in recent years. These embargoes were the direct result of political pressure by consumer-group representatives and leaders of labor unions. The meat imports are always pushed above quota by the same groups.

Why should our government use food as a “weapon” to force other food-producing countries of the world to sell down their stocks? Why should the farmers in this country be forced to erect more storage or pile grain on the ground? This is poor Christian stewardship as well as hoarding. Our nation’s food policy is directed at cheap, plentiful groceries in the United States, not on full production and world-wide distribution, as it should be.

CARL J. REISS, JR.

Connell. Wash.

This past year CHRISTIANITY TODAY has turned out some fine issues, and the July 16 issue dealing with problems of world hunger and Third World development is no exception. I especially enjoyed the article by Ronald Sider, “Mischief by Statute.” Near the end of his article he asks “Have you ever wondered why apples grown in a neighboring orchard or state cost more than bananas imported from another continent?” I am ashamed to say that while I lived in Canada I was never bothered by the problem. I was even so naïve as to believe that the grocery chains sold them at a loss as a customer come-on. Thanks for clearing up my thinking.… Bananas that grow here in Indonesia cost more here than they do in Canada and probably the United States as well.… The local people pay top price for second-grade produce while the first grade is sold dirt cheap in Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America.

I would also like to comment on the article “Hunger: Twenty Easy Questions, No Easy Answers.” … I almost choked on the question “Is ‘the right to food’ compatible with Scripture?” The question itself is an indictment against Christianity.… Arthur Simon’s answer was beautiful: “The Bible doesn’t say in so many words, ‘People have the right to food,’ any more than it says, ‘People have the right to breathe,’ but the intention of God is abundantly clear.”

(The Rev.) FRANK M. BYRNE

Seminari Theologia Indonesia

Tondano, Sultara. Indonesia

Where Imagination Isn’T

Thank you for printing the interview with Joe Bayly about the state of the Sunday school (Aug. 6). The most valuable part was his final observation on the present state of preaching among evangelicals. Our sermons resemble cars coming off an assembly line. They are often void of imagination, and their success is measured by their sameness. The minister who uses Christ’s methods of preaching is likely to be labeled a liberal heretic.

BILL COLEMAN

Aurora, Neb.

In the interview Mr. Bayly said that “Sunday-school teachers want Bible characters to look Anglo-Saxon” instead of Jewish. He then concluded that “there is much latent anti-Semitism in the evangelical church.”

No doubt it is good that Bible characters in Sunday-school literature look Jewish. An Anglo-Saxon Lazarus is a bit ludicrous. No doubt Aunt Gert who teaches juniors should be more open-minded about these things, less provincial. But anti-Semitism? Come on, Mr. Bayly, do you have evidence of this evil other than a drop in your sales volume?

S. BOWEN MATTHEWS

Brandywine Valley Baptist Church

Wilmington, Del.

Decadence Through Non-Support

Indeed, if The Omen “is not worth anyone’s two hours or two dollars,” Thomas Howard’s review (Aug. 6) is hardly worth the time it takes to read it. Unfortunately, it is not a film review but a dragging out of the age-old battle between Hollywood and the Church. It is doubtful that the producers of The Omen claimed to have a corner on theological truth. Their concern, as always, was monetary. To say they muddled prophecy is to say nothing that we all, at one time or another, haven’t also said about some learned theologian we differ with. If the film’s scenario allows for most anything, it could be because the Bible itself allows for such a latitude of interpretations.…

As films go, The Omen is good. The danger does not lie in its interpretation of Scripture but in the desensitizing effect it will have on the moviegoing crowd. The film reduces prophecy to just another of a long succession of horror films and therefore makes the acceptance of any plausible interpretation more difficult.

Biblically we have no cause to expect anything from Hollywood. If the Church and Hollywood aren’t on good terms, it isn’t Hollywood’s fault. If we want better things from Hollywood, we should be lining up at the box office to support their better efforts. I am afraid that our pious refusal to attend the better films of prior years for fear of supporting the movie industry was self-defeating. We must now live with the decadence we helped, through non-support, to create.

STEVEN D. CHEATWOOD

Roanoke, Va.

Democrats And Abortion

Your news department continues to perpetuate the illusion that opposition to abortion is primarily Roman Catholic.… In the July 16 issue (News, Religion in Transit), you cite the criticism of the Democratic party’s pro-abortion platform plank by Roman Catholic archbishop Bernardin. Did you miss the fact that Mildred Jefferson, M.D., an evangelical Methodist and head of National Right to Life, and I myself, speaking for the Christian Action Council, condemned it no less equivocally? It is somewhat misleading to call it “mildly worded.” However mild the wording, the fact is that the plank commits the party to opposing both a mandatory human-life amendment and the state’s-rights type that would once again permit the people to legislate on the issue. Governor Carter’s appeal to evangelicals … surely fosters the impression that as president he would do something to restore biblical morality to government. His role in promoting adoption of the pro-abortion plank certainly casts cold water on such a hope. Christians should pray for Carter, both as a campaigner and if elected as president, to have the ability to apply biblical principles in public as well as in private life.

HAROLD O. J. BROWN

Associate Professor, Systematic Theology

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Ill.

Athletes For Moscow

The July 2 editorial “Christians at the Olympics” noted that a major evangelical effort was under way at the Olympics.… It is doubtful there will be such an organization at the twenty-second Olympiad in Moscow.… I would urge CHRISTIANITY TODAY to challenge the world-wide evangelical community to begin training Christian athletes to compete for their place in the 1980 Olympics. A special challenge should be directed at our evangelical Christian colleges to do their part in supplying candidates for the Olympics.

LOUIS M. MERRYMAN, JR.

Aiea, Hawaii

Improvement In Peru

Thank you for the news story “Welcome Withdrawn” (June 4). We are happy to state that the situation in Peru has improved considerably. The Peruvian government has given an extension of five months, asking for a withdrawal by May of 1977, and at that time it will only be part of our personnel that would be requested to leave, not all of them. It is in the negotiation state as to who will leave and who will stay. We thank God for this turnaround. The minister of education in Peru often mentioned how much he would like this work to continue, but the … government wants this to be done by nationals rather than expatriates.

DAVID FARAH

Wycliffe Bible Translators

Washington, D.C.

ERRATUM

The captions identifying the photos of Brian Price and Peter Foggin in the August 27 news story “Outreach at the Olympics” were reversed in the makeup process. We regret the mixup.

Karl barth’s name stands out for an unexpected wave of neo-orthodox theology in the middle of our century. Barth’s early books certainly signaled an end to the rule of theological liberalism. Although his early writings show ethical weaknesses that are characteristic also of some reformational orthodoxy, they did prepare a good section of the German church for resistance to the cult of the nation in 1933.

Barth in his later years turned more and more to the Scriptures as the only source of theology, refusing domination by philosophies. The last two or three volumes of his Church Dogmatics show this clearly. His new stance, though, did not exert the same influence throughout the length and breadth of the Church as his earlier one had. Problems and positions of liberal theology have come back and dominated the last twenty years, and the age of “Barthianism” now almost looks like an episode in the history of theology in the twentieth century.

Shortly after Barth’s death in 1968, a program of publishing his complete works was set up that may in the end run to eighty volumes. The editors were successful in catching the public eye by first publishing several volumes of Barth’s letters: his correspondence with Bultmann (showing early roots of their later disagreement), followed by two volumes of Barth’s early exchange of letters with his closest friend, Eduard Thurneysen. More recently, a collection of letters from the last seven years of Barth’s life has proved to be of great interest (Briefe 1961–1968, edited by J. Fangmeier and H. Stoevesandt, Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 1975). The book gives intimate insights into Barth’s mature thinking and reveals a much clearer picture of his position in the crosscurrents of our time. It may come as a surprise to many.

Barth felt that the Roman Catholic Church and theology had begun to move, to an extent he had not imagined before. But in what direction? One of the most captivating elements of the book is the letters Barth sent to Hans Küng, Roman theologian of world renown who began his career with a thesis on Barth and later became a frequent visitor to Barth’s home. Barth watched closely Küng’s efforts to reform the church. He compared him with Luther on his way to Worms. But there are also, toward the end, two long letters expressing Barth’s “deep-rooted” anxiety that Küng and his friends might tend toward a kind of Protestant rationalism as in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and repeat its mistakes. Barth was one of the first to point out the dangers of present-day Catholic progressives who may set out to discover biblical Christianity but who quickly bypass it, ending up in theological liberalism or worse.

Much has been said about Barth’s political position, which at times seemed strangely one-sided. In this volume for the first time one gets a glimpse behind the scenes, e.g., of Barth’s wrestling with Professor Hromadka of the Prague Peace Conference, something he would not allow to come into the open. He felt that Hromadka had become partisan in the Cold War, lacking that “superior position” which means the proclamation of the Kingdom in the East just as much as in the West. He had noticed the same onesidedness in the World Peace Movement. He never supported it and felt that “Picasso’s Bird” was just an anti-American vulture and not a dove of comfort to all kind of people.

Of course, in a book like this one looks for Barth’s opinions of theological trends of the day. There are letters to Jürgen Moltmann and to Wolfhart Pannenberg commenting on their first major books without flattery. The most pressing problem of those years was, though, what Barth called “the sick theology of our day,” “those miserable existentialists,” and the Bultmannians, whom he used to name “the Company of Korah.” He spoke unsparingly of John A. T. Robinson and of Dorothee Solle (“that woman ‘should keep silence in the churches’!”).

While he publicly exhorted church leaders not to be unduly impressed by the “co*ck-a-doodle-doo” of a few hundred students of theology and their busybody professors (“He that sitteth in the heavens … shall have them in derision”), in letters to close friends he would admit that looking at the follies of those theologians made him feel disgusted and tired. How should one deal with them? In some letters he says they should be spoken to more squarely, and he waits for the man who will rise up and do away with the lot, in the manner of his own dealings with liberal theology in the twenties. Then again he strongly advises against making public martyrs of them. His main concern seems to be that one should be guided not by the adversary all the time but by the subject matter of the Gospel itself. This is why he rebukes evangelicals (and some of his own school) who confine themselves to polemics instead of “caring and praying for the Church’s positive witness to become much more definite, clear, and concentrated.”

One of the remarkable features of these letters is the stirring pastoral touch frequently shown. He will admonish one of his first class of confirmands (herself now well into her sixties) to attend church more regularly. To an old-age pensioner he sends a check so that “the Kingdom of God may not be in words, but in power.” There is hardly a letter that does not carry an element suited to build the faith of the addressee, be it a young girl or a university professor. Often he will quote a line from a hymn. A regular preacher at Basel prison, in a letter he urges one of the inmates “not to cease with prayer but to love God Who from eternity has destined you to be His friend.” To an old friend suffering from much illness he writes. “You and we all are held by the Best Hand, and we will hold to it, too, won’t we?” The illnesses and prolonged hospitalizations of his own last years he took in the mood that “God has kept me happy and healthy for so many years; should I now complain?”

Faith was real to him, and his letters show a cheerful spirituality that not all theologians call their own. Barth’s theology needs to be tested, and not a little of it contested. We must never attach ourselves to any theologian blindly, buying his system as a whole. It is to God himself and to his Word that we have pledged our loyalty. Barth was “a man with his contradictions.” But he was also a father in Christ, a man of God, and we see him drawing always nearer to the authority of God’s Word.

It is to be hoped that this volume of Barth’s last letters will soon be published in English, because it gives not only shrewd judgment on today’s theological trends but also evidence of the reality of the ever living God.

KLAUS BOCKMÜHL

Letters have poured in concerning an advertisem*nt placed in CHRISTIANITY TODAY by some evangelicals for Jimmy Carter. The magazine’s board and staff include Republicans and Democrats. We do not endorse any particular candidate. If any evangelicals want to place ads for the Republican candidate, we will accept them. We do think our readers should know what the candidates stand for. It is quite possible that a good Christian might make a bad president. We urge every reader to vote—under God, and led by the Spirit. And let’s be grateful that the presidential brouhaha comes along only every four years!

As troubled Ethiopia’s military junta moves closer to Marxist ideology, Christians are encountering adversity. Meanwhile, despite difficulties of a different nature, a remarkable people’s movement in the Christian faith is growing in the southern part of the nation.

The National Democratic Revolution Program announced by Major Mengistu Haile-Mariam, first vice-chairman of the Provincial Military Administrative Council (PMAC), is being implemented to establish the Peoples Democratic Republic of Ethiopia as a socialist state. In a speech to the nation last April, the leader listed missionaries as the number-one source of imperialist infiltration in the past. Teachers were listed second. Later, a popular radio program alleged that Ethiopian teachers in church schools were really “black missionaries” exploiting the people.

Newspapers and radio broadcasts have increasingly named missionaries and churches as agents working against the interests of the state. Missionaries, pastors, and priests have been harangued by local “workers’ revolutionary forums” that hold indoctrination and self-criticism meetings. All organizations, including missions, must give their Ethiopian staff two hours per week off to attend these forums.

While much of the PMAC’s effort is aimed at breaking the stranglehold that Amharic landlords and the Orthodox Church had on the nation, the result has been a vacuum of power. Local committees have taken power to enforce their policies, even if they are contrary to PMAC directives. Students and peasants have taken the law into their own hands to settle grievances, real or imaginary.

Christians have also been infected with the revolutionary spirit of the day. For example, some students—whipped into hostility by a revolutionary—accused their missionary benefactors of exploiting them, and forcibly confined them to their houses. Hospital staffers placed missionaries under house arrest when exorbitant demands could not be met. A group of revolution-minded young people marched a church leader barefoot at gunpoint more than eight miles and then forced him to ox-plow a field for an hour before releasing him.

In spite of such problems, some of the revolutionary changes have spurred evangelism in the south of the country, where 23,000 conversions over a four-month period have recently been reported among animistic people in one tribe.

One major factor in this new response has been the breaking down of fear of the all-powerful Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which used to persecute evangelicals and imprison evangelists virtually at will. Its power, steadily eroding since the revolution began, was dealt a final blow when the PMAC removed its patriarch allegedly for mismanaging $2 million of church funds. A southerner was elected to replace him (see following story).

The abolition of the feudal landlord system means that Christian peasants, once held in serfdom, are now able to use the proceeds of their harvests to support evangelists. (Farther north, where farmers’ cooperatives are dominated by Marxists, the contributions of Christian farmers are not available for Christian work.)

A third impetus has come from a course in personal evangelism given to pastors and evangelists. Stirred with a sense of urgency to spread the Gospel, evangelists have moved across the mountainous countryside with little other than their Bibles and a bag of millet and leaves for food.

This remarkable response after twenty years of fairly uneventful work has challenged church leaders to absorb thousands of new believers. Elders observe the lives of new converts to see if they are genuine before taking them in to baptismal classes.

Since Ethiopian policy before the revolution banned Scripture translation in tribal vernaculars, and since few can read the Amharic lingua franca, church leaders are planning a crash program of printing “key Scriptures” in the local language. Plans also call for a cassette player for each of the 2,300 churches, with cassettes containing New Life for All discipling material.

Although removed from the strong Marxism of other districts, southern believers still face their own difficulties. Most animist relatives strongly oppose their conversion. The anti-feudal laws, while commendable in many aspects, make it compulsory for a farmer to reside on his farm. Permission must be obtained to leave for even a few days. As a result, some evangelists have had to choose between retaining their ancestral lot of land or losing it in order to take the Gospel to others.

Changes In Ethiopia

For the first time in its 1,600-year history, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church chose a patriarch by election. Selection previously was by appointment of the emperor or the Egyptian Coptic Church. It was the first time any institution has elected its leaders since the military seized power two years ago and later deposed the late Emperor Haile Selassie, according to Washington Post reporter David Ottoway.

The winner from among five candidates was southerner Malaku Wolde-Michael, 58, credited with the conversion of 300,000 animists and the building of eighty-five churches and twenty-four schools in his home province. Electors from all over the country met in the Trinity Cathedral of Addis Ababa and chose the relatively unknown candidate over several establishment candidates in the hierarchy.

Relations between the church and the government have been strained. The military has assumed a socialist stance and established a policy of separation of church and state, taking away a lot of church property and power in the process. Leaders of the church, which claims the allegiance of between 12 and 14 million, are worried about finances. There are 18,000 churches, nineteen important monasteries, and 200,000 clergy to care for.

Early this year the government announced that Patriarch Theophilus had been arrested and replaced by Acting Patriarch Yohannes. A number of church organizations, including the National Council of Churches in the United States, have requested information about Theophilus’s welfare and whereabouts—but to no avail as of last month.

On another front, Ethiopia announced the nationalization of the 135-bed Empress Zauditu Memorial Hospital, a Seventh-day Adventist institution in Addis Ababa. There are thirty-nine Adventist churches with more than 25,000 members in Ethiopia.

Under Attack

A Dutch priest in Mexico has warned Mexican Catholics to reject a proposed Billy Graham crusade in Mexico City on grounds that it is a front for an ideological invasion of the country. The attack by Francisco Vanderhoff, director of an ecumenical study center, appeared in an interview article on page one of the Mexico City daily Novedades.

“They use the path of religion to reach the people with political ideas, glorifying and defending the North American system,” the priest charged. He also repeated many of the accusations that have been hurled by Graham critics over the years, and he added a new one: that Graham has ties with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Upon hearing of the press attack, Graham expressed surprise at the priest’s attack in light of the fact that members of the Catholic hierarchy have welcomed him to many nations. He denied the charge of CIA links as well as the other accusations.

Mexico City evangelicals who invited the evangelist wrote letters of protest to the paper. In pointing out inaccuracies, they noted that the December, 1976, date for the crusade listed in the article was wrong. Graham is considering 1977 or 1978 dates.

Tragedy Along The Thompson

Among the dead and missing after a freak downpour sent a ten-foot wall of water coursing through the Thompson River canyon in Colorado were seven Campus Crusade for Christ staff women. Nearly two dozen others, including Vonette Bright—wife of Crusade’s founder-president Bill Bright—escaped by only seconds.

The women—national staffers and wives of top staffers—were at a weekend retreat at Sylvandale Ranch along U. S. highway 34, east of Estes Park. Fifteen miles away, some 2,500 young people were gathering that Saturday, July 31, on the Colorado State University campus at Fort Collins for Crusade’s annual staff training conference. The thirty women were expected later.

That night a siren interrupted the women’s conference. A highway patrol car roared into the area. Using a loudspeaker, the patrolman instructed everyone to move to higher ground at once. The women rushed to their cars, and several drove up into a field behind the ranch. But two drivers, one of them Marilyn Henderson, drove out onto the highway and headed downstream, apparently to follow the patrolman.

Ms. Henderson was found the next morning lodged in the branches of a tree. Melanie Alquist, who had been with her in the front seat, was found further downstream. Both were taken to Loveland Hospital where early this month they were reported to be in good condition, with Ms. Henderson recovering from pneumonia. The three in the back seat of the car were found dead as was one from the other vehicle.

The dead: Rae Ann Johnston of Crystal, North Dakota; Cathie Loomis of Seattle; Carol Rhoad of Grantsville, Pennsylvania; and Pressy Manongdo of the Philippines. Missing and presumed dead were Barbara Leydon of Washington, D. C.; Terri Bissing of Kansas City; and June Fujiwara of Hawaii. Also dead was a patrolman, possibly the one who had warned of the danger.

On Sunday the survivors began arriving at Fort Collins. Bill Bright led in memorial services for the dead, and there were prayers for the missing.

At Last, A Schwenkfelder

It may never happen again: millions of Americans now know of the Schwenkfelders, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s announcement of Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his running mate weeks before the Republican convention.

Schweiker is one of only 2,690 members of the Schwenkfelder Church. His membership, like that of about half the others, is in the Central Schwenkfelder Church of Worcester in southeastern Pennsylvania. There are only four other congregations, all in Pennsylvania. Three have voted to affiliate with the United Church of Christ, from whom most of the Schwenkfelders’ ministers have come.

The group is named for Kaspar Schwenkfeld von Ossig, a sixteenth-century Silesian reformer who emphasized a somewhat mystical inner life rather than doctrine, ritual, or organization. The first immigrant Schwenkfelders arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1730s, but the group did not get around to organizing a church until 1910. Before that, members simply banded together family-style, and laymen were appointed to lead them.

In Washington, Schweiker attends St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, and his wife teaches a Bible class there.

A Year Off From Work

Cult “deprogrammer” Ted Patrick, 46, of San Diego was sentenced to jail for one year by a judge in Fullerton, California. The sentence was handed down for his conviction last year in a kidnap and attempted deprogramming case involving a 19-year-old member of the Hare Krishna (Krishna Consciousness) sect. That conviction, said the judge, also amounted to a violation of a one-year probation set by a Denver judge in an earlier case there. Therefore Patrick was given a sixty-day sentence for the Fullerton incident and a one-year term for probation violation, to be served concurrently.

“I am going to jail for an honorable cause.” Patrick announced after the sententing, and he vowed he would keep up the fight against cults that “psychologically kidnap” people. His lawyer said he will appeal.

Shortly before his sentencing in Fullerton. Patrick was arrested with several others in Long Beach. New Jersey, The case involved the seizure and attempted deprogramming of two brothers (ages 23 and 26) from Guru Maharaj Ji’s Divine Light Mission. One of the youths escaped through a bathroom window and called police. The brothers’ parents and four of Patrick’s assistants were all charged with false imprisonment. Bail was set at $25,000 each. All were released on personal recognizance bonds.

Although often in trouble with the law, Patrick had spent only two weeks in jail before the Fullerton sentence, and that was in Denver, where he was released on $25,000 bail and probation.

A Prescription

There are bound to be some eyebrows raised at a position paper released by the board of directors of the Massachusetts Council of Churches. In the paper, the board calls for the establishment of experimental heroin-maintenance programs. The board members say that a well-run program under which addicts are given heroin legally will result in fewer health risks and more rehabilitative possibilities for the addict, in lower crime rates, and in reduced pressures on the legal system. The paper acknowledges that the idea might prove unworkable. “If so,” it states, “we hope that critics of such an approach will not only show its flaws, but will propose better alternatives for confronting the crises of drug addiction and its attendant crime.”

Galluping Faith

The findings of a recent Gallup Poll offer a “positive outlook for religion in America as we enter the third century of our existence.” The poll found that 94 per cent of the American people believe in God and 69 per cent believe in life after death, percentages that have remained fairly constant since 1948. But the percentage who believe religion is “increasing its influence on American society,” a figure that dropped from 69 per cent in 1957 to 14 per cent in 1970, rose to 39 per cent last year. In other words, more and more people are finding reasons to believe that religious faith is having an impact on national life.

The declines that began in the sixties have bottomed out, the study concludes, and America may be in the first stages of spiritual renewal.

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF

Family-life specialists Delmer W. Holbrook and his wife have been lecturing and conducting surveys for Seventh-day Adventists across America. In a survey of hundreds of children, the Holbrooks came up with the three things fathers say most in responding to their kids.

“I’m too tired,” takes first place. “We don’t have enough money,” is second. And “keep quiet” is third.

Freeze In Colombia

Colombia has put a freeze on all new missionary visas pending the introduction of new regulations, including some sort of quota system, according to mission sources. President Luciano Jaramillo of the Confederation of Evangelical Churches of Colombia (CEDEC) says the government wants to update information on which missionaries are presently in Colombia. CEDEC has been directed to collect the information and to serve as an intermediary between the government and the various missions, adds Jaramillo. Details of the quota system have not been spelled out yet.

Government officials have said they are tired of dealing with forty or fifty religious organizations with different representatives and systems of government that frequently change. There is speculation that all future missionary visa requests by Protestants will have to be cleared through CEDEC.

Church Affairs

The charismatic movement, the ecumenical movement, and the movement to endorse the ordination of hom*osexuals and women all received some harsh words at the annual meeting of the one-million-member American Baptist Association, headquartered in Texarkana, Texas.

At the annual conference of the 180,000-member Church of the Brethren, the 900 delegates approved a 10,000-word policy statement on alcohol use. It upholds abstinence as the church’s official position but does not call for the censure of those in the church who drink.

Delegates to the 221,500-member National Association of Free Will Baptists convention voted to make ineligible for church office elders (ministers) and deacons who have been divorced and remarried, regardless of their innocence or guilt in the divorce. hom*osexuality, sexual promiscuity, and humanism in public schools were criticized. A dress-code proposal was voted down, apparently because it was not strong or specific enough.

Highlights of other meetings:

Evangelical Covenant Church of America. Some 640 delegates from 308 member churches, representing nearly 73,000 ECCA members in North America, approved “on principle” the ordination of women and an important statement on divorce and remarriage at the ECCA’s ninety-first annual meeting, held at Tacoma, Washington. The statement attempts to deal with the reality of divorce while upholding the sanctity of marriage and unity of the family. When there is repentance, forgiveness, and an attempt to understand why the marriage failed, a divorced person may consider the possibility of remarriage, according to the ECCA position. The door was left open for divorced pastors to continue their ministries.

Conservative Baptists. More than 1,200 pastors, missionaries, and laypersons assembled at Valley Forge for their thirty-third annual meeting and passed resolutions calling for stronger family life (especially through an emphasis on family worship) and opposing Transcendental Meditation as a religious cult. Thirty-six missionaries were added to the CB force of nearly 700 workers serving in twenty-two nations. There are 1,120 CB congregations in the United States with 300,000 members.

General Association of Regular Baptist Churches. Nearly 1,500 messengers (delegates) at the forty-fifth annual GARBC conference in Seattle heard that forty-nine new churches had been accepted into the fellowship the past year, bringing the total number of congregations to 1,528. The missions committee reported that the five GARBC-approved agencies now have 1,915 missionaries at work in more than fifty countries. The messengers pledged to champion “biblical separation while rejecting a bitter, caustic spirit” but disavowed “any fellowship with neoevangelicals,” mentioning the National Association of Evangelicals by name. They criticized the women’s liberation movement and condemned the Equal Rights Amendment. They also condemned immorality on the part of government leaders. Reaffirmed was the GARBC’s belief in the pre-tribulation rapture of the Church, a de facto test of fellowship.

The Wesleyan Church. Meeting in Wichita, Kansas, delegates from twenty nations, representing a worldwide membership of 137,000 (85,000 of them in the United States), heard glowing reports of growth and effective outreach spanning the past quadrennium. In an important action, the delegates by a vote of 280 to 99 adopted a recommendation of the denomination’s administrative board to end merger talks with the Free Methodist Church, which had been going on for six years (see May 10, 1974, issue, page 50). There had been uneasiness at the grass-roots level over the looser approach to Scripture by some Free Methodists, over a projected compromise that would leave Free Methodist schools free of tight denominational control in a merger, and over the Free Methodists’ failure to vote on a merger plan in 1974. Other issues also figured in the action. Delegates agreed, however, to maintain cooperative programs with the Free Methodists (printing, Christian education, youth work).

African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Meeting in Atlanta for the AMEC’s quadrennial convention, 1,400 delegates of the 2.5-million-member body came out against abortion on demand, hom*osexual marriages, and capital punishment. Support was voiced for black liberation movements in South Africa and Rhodesia and for women’s equality. Clergyman Richard Allen Chappelle of Jacksonville, Florida, was elected as the denomination’s general conference secretary (chief executive) to succeed Russell S. Brown, 78, who is retiring after thirty years in the post.

Religion In Transit

Missouri voters defeated a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have authorized some $10 million annually in state aid to parochial and private schools.

Not only is there no “general religious revival” occurring today among high school youth, as widely believed, but the trend is in the opposite direction, according to Catholic sociologist Dean Hoge. Basing his remarks on studies by Purdue University and a research unit of the Catholic University of America, he concludes that religious faith among teen-agers has decreased by 15 to 20 per cent since the 1950s.

After Macmillan publishing company of Canada was tried and acquitted on obscenity charges in connection with its sex education book, Show Me, the book became a sellout in a number of Canadian stores. It shows nude children exploring one another’s bodies and illustrates sex acts between teen-agers. Marshall McLuhan testified against the book; rabbi W. Gunter Plaut and United Church of Canada clergyman Barry Brooks endorsed its use.

Christian radio executive David L. Hofer of Dinuba, California, a Mennonite Brethren member, was reelected president of Gideons International at the group’s 77th convention in San Francisco. World membership is 51,151 (33,741 in the United States), an all-time high, he says. The Gideons place Bibles (in forty-three languages) in hotel rooms, prisons, and hospitals in 109 countries.

Six people were arrested during a police raid of a bingo operation at the storefront Church of All Faiths of Pomona, California. Patrons were required to buy a Bible for $ 10.60 in return for game cards. Investigators say the church grossed $16,000 a month on the scheme.

DEATH

OLIVER BOYCE GREENE, 61, fundamentalist Baptist radio preacher; in Greenville, South Carolina, during heart surgery.

World Scene

Hundreds of Vietnamese Catholic priests have been arrested throughout what was formerly South Viet Nam, say church sources, and all foreign clergy have been asked to leave. Few remained as of last month.

Because of political tension, many missionaries have left Uganda. Some say they will stay in Kenya indefinitely. More than thirty Anglican missionaries, however, were still on the job this month.

Former U. S. Army chaplain James Hutchens, 41, a well-known evangelical, is seeking to have Israel’s Supreme Court reverse its decision denying him and his family immigrant status. The court’s action was in connection with a complaint that Hutchens still retained his belief in Jesus despite his ritual conversion to Judaism under an Orthodox rabbi in the United States.

After East Timor declared its independence from Portugal last December, Indonesian forces invaded the 7,400-square-mile island enclave, and the Indonesian government annexed it as its twenty-seventh province. East Timorese exiles claim 60,000 of their 670,000 countrymen were killed and 100,000 were imprisoned. A third of the population is Catholic; the rest is mostly animist. The World Council of Churches months ago called on Indonesia to withdraw. In the mid-sixties, revival swept the western side of the island, long a part of Indonesia.

Some 125 Nigerian missionary couples are serving under the Evangelical Missionary Society, the mission arm of the Evangelical Churches of West Africa (ECWA). The missionaries serve in neighboring Benin and Nigeria as well as in remote areas of Nigeria. ECWA is an outgrowth of Sudan Interior Mission work.

Israeli officials say 6,000 Jews have emigrated from the Soviet Union since January. Half have gone to Israel.

Alcoholism among Britain’s teen-agers has risen sharply, according to the National Council on Alcoholism.

Two years ago a group of evangelical leaders gathered in Montreal to discuss strategy for the upcoming Olympic games. The leaders included representatives of the evangelical community in Montreal and of outreach organizations in both Canada and the United States. Thus was born the cooperative evangelical endeavor known as Aide Olympique.

It was decided that at Montreal there would be more emphasis than there had been during the 1972 games in Munich on involving Christian athletes in ministry, on serving where needs existed with no strings (or tracts) attached, and on reaching the residents of the host city, not just the visitors to the games.

As Olympiad XXII wound to a close last month, outreach leaders gathered to assess their efforts:

• There was more togetherness, more mutual ministry and nurture, and more active engagement in witness on the part of Christians among the 10,000 competing athletes than in any other Olympics in decades.

• The city-wide witness campaign was the best coordinated, most extensive cooperative evangelistic effort in Montreal’s history.

• A greater sense of unity and cooperation exists in the comparatively small and divided evangelical community than at any other time in memory.

Montreal is an unlikely place for all this to happen. Founded in 1642, it is Canada’s largest city, and its nearly three million people are predominantly French-speaking Catholics—as are 80 per cent of the people of Quebec province.

With the Olympics came troubled times for the city: costs had exceeded the initial budget by nearly $1 billion, security was tight, hundreds of athletes were becoming pawns in political battles. The athletes themselves had their own problems to think about.

To help out at that point, the Canadian Olympic Organizing Committee had provided for a chaplaincy program for the athletes. Seven clergymen of various faiths and denominations were chosen as chaplains. Four dozen volunteers speaking a total of thirty languages assisted the chaplains. (The German, Austrian, and Norwegian teams brought along their own chaplains.) The clergy conducted services and were available for counseling. Most of those who showed up at the pastoral-services office were Eastern Europeans.

“They came mostly out of curiosity,” said Anglican Peter Prosser, 29, the evangelical member of the pastoral team.

Prosser, who led a Japanese woman coach to faith in Christ, helped to arrange three Sunday-morning meetings for Christian athletes in a large room next to the chaplaincy offices. Attendance ranged from about a dozen on the first Sunday to thirty-five the third week, most of them Americans. Among them: Madeline Jackson, 800-meter sprinter; John Naber, gold medalist in swimming; Fred Newhouse, silver medalist in the 400-meter run; Cynthia Poor, 1,500-meter runner; triple-jumper Tommy Haynes; Fred Dixon, decathlon; and Mike Johnson, two-man kayak.

Ms. Jackson, a 28-year-old mother who won a gold medal at Mexico City in 1968 but failed at Munich, served as the informal leader of the Sunday meetings. A graduate in sociology from Tennessee State University, she works for the Salvation Army in Cleveland, where she is a member of the Church of God in Christ. “Running is my Christian ministry,” she says, and when she signs autographs, she adds, “Running for Jesus.”

On the second Sunday, Ms. Jackson broke into tears after a chaplain’s assistant read a passage that showed God was working out victory in Moses’ life during a time of seeming defeat. “I failed in the semi-finals yesterday,” explained Ms. Jackson, who had set a record in the pre-Olympic warm-up. “I needed that passage; the Lord spoke to me through it.”

“I love the Lord,” said Fred Newhouse, who later in the week lost the gold medal to a Cuban by a fraction of a second. “Pray that the Lord will make me a better Christian.”

Johnson, 35, a fireman who attends Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, California, distributed more than fifty Bibles and New Testaments to Eastern Europeans. Others came to the chaplaincy office and requested the Scriptures outright. Haynes traded Bibles to Soviets for pins.

In all some fifty organizations and 3,500 workers were part of Aide Olympique. Youth With a Mission (YWAM) had the largest group, with 1,600 young people from fifty-three nations and thirty-nine languages, from Arabic and Armenian to Vende and Zulu. The largest YWAM contingent was from Europe (Finland, 120; France and Switzerland, 200; England, 120; Germany, 80; Holland, 50). There were 73 Egyptians and 130 South Africans, both black and white. Each day, half of the group commuted from YWAM’s base sixty-five miles away to witness assignments in Montreal while the other half attended training sessions.

Other large groups: Ambassadors in Mission, 325, two-thirds of them from Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, the rest from Assemblies of God (U.S.); Literature Crusades (Plymouth Brethren), 125; Free Methodists and Wesleyan youth, 100; Salvation Army, 100; Youth for Christ, 100.

Ministries varied. Most workers engaged in personal evangelism and literature distribution. Many did door-to-door visitation in conjunction with local church projects. The Free Methodist-Wesleyan group helped to establish a new French-speaking church.

Some workers helped out with AO’s social-service projects. Hundreds of meals were served daily, calls poured into the telephone crisis center, free housing was lined up for stranded tourists, information and literature centers were kept busy. Directing AO’s social-service aspect was Egyptian-born Ramez Atallah, 30, who heads Inter-Varisty Christian Fellowship’s work in French Canada. “Evangelicals need to be known for their service of love as well as for their buttons,” he says. AO picked up the slack when Montreal officials found there was no money for the city to provide such services.

In most cases, the young workers had paid their own expenses in order to be in Montreal. Scripture Gift Mission, Pocket Testament League, and the Canadian Bible Society provided hundreds of thousands of copies of Testaments and Scripture portions.

Non-AO evangelistic teams and a Catholic charismatic youth outreach organization helped to swell the total number of workers to about 4,000.

A referral system for follow-up was worked out for those making spiritual decisions (at least three-fourths of those reported were made by Montreal residents, whose names will be assigned to local church members).

Fellowship rallies for AO participants were held nightly in a downtown church. On the last three nights, evangelistic services were conducted by Leighton Ford. About 2,000 attended the final night.

Heading the AO program as executive secretary was Peter Foggin, 38, who arrived in Montreal in 1963 as a missionary sponsored by Plymouth Brethren Churches in British Columbia. He and fellow Brethren worker Fernand St. Louis launched a weekly broadcast that is well known in French Canada. A Ph.D., Foggin also taught urban geography at the University of Montreal. “The churches of Montreal could be revolutionized by the input of this outreach,” says he. “Just 250 new disciples could do it.”

AO’s chairman was another Brethren worker, Keith Price, a prime mover in the witness project at Expo 67 utilizing Moody Science Films. Out of that grew a ministry, Christian Directions, which he heads and which apparently will take up the evangelical coordination cause begun by AO. He shares Foggin’s belief that much can come of the Olympic outreach.

Perhaps so. For reasons deeply entwined in Quebec’s history, evangelical churches in the province tend to be small. Only a handful have more than 300 in Sunday services, and these are nearly all English speaking. Signs of life, however, were noticeable in the recent spread and growth of small French-speaking Protestant churches.

The Huguenots (French Protestants) had a role in the founding of New France (as Quebec was then called) in the late 1500s and early 1600s. But with the passing of ecclesio-political power into the hands of the Jesuits, the Protestant numbers diminished. A hundred years ago there were sixty-three French-speaking Presbyterian churches. Today there are virtually none.

Many of those of French descent deeply regret the British conquest of New France and its subsequent assimilation into Canada, and cling resolutely to their culture and language. Moving to head off the radical separatist call for independence, the government has made many concessions, including the maintenance of a separate French Catholic school system. French-speaking Protestants got squeezed in the crunch. The “Protestant” or public school system in Quebec is English speaking.

Because of the political tensions and uncertainties, many English-speaking people have moved from the province in the last decade, weakening many Protestant churches.

Meanwhile, there have been many changes among Catholics, too. The provincial government is essentially secular. Only a third of the Catholics are practicing ones. Since Vatican II, open hostility to Protestants has all but disappeared (religious discrimination and even persecution was a fact of life for some Protestants as late as the 1950s). Also, the charismatic movement has been growing rapidly among Catholics in the last three years (an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 are part of it). Evangelicals tend to be wary of it, although YWAM joined in a pre-Olympic march and rally with thousands of young Catholic charismatics.

A key figure in the movement’s spread is Trinitarian priest Jean-Paul Régimbal, a noted criminologist and prison chaplain. Through contact with Episcopal charismatics while he was in Arizona recuperating from a lung disorder, he received the charismatic experience. Back in Canada in 1970 he was put in charge of the retreat house in Granby, where he has guided thousands into the movement directly and indirectly. A youth wing of the movement, “Youth Testimony,” has approximately 10,000 members. One of its leaders is Marcel Paquin, a hardened ex-criminal whom Regimbal led to Christ in jail. The youth group, with thirty full-time workers, fielded its own witness teams from all over the province for the Olympics and set up a permanent coffeehouse in north Montreal.

“Our main message,” says Michelle Daneau, 20, “is that Christ died to save us and is risen. That is what has to be said, and that’s what we are saying.”

Pointers On Preaching

God Has a Communication Problem, by Chester Pennington (Hawthorn, 1976. 136 pp., $6.95). The Word and the Words, by Colin Morris (Abingdon, 1975, 174 pp., $3.95 pb), Preaching God’s Burning Word, by James Reese (Liturgical Press, 1975, 135 pp., $3.85 pb), Put a Door on It, by Louis Paul Lehman (Kregel, 1975, 102 pp., $3.50), The Art and Craft of Preaching, by Herbert Loekyer (Baker, 1975. 118 pp., $3.95 pb). Preaching For the People, by Lowell Erdahl (Abingdon, 1976, 127 pp., $5.95), and Preaching the Good News, by George Sweazey (Prentice-Hall, 1976, 339 pp., $9.95), are reviewed by Cecil B. Murphey, pastor, Riverdale Presbyterian Church, Riverdale, Georgia.

“Preaching is God’s problem, too,” states Chester Pennington in God Has a Communication Problem. “If what we believe about the church is true, God is concerned about how effectively the gospel is preached and celebrated by ministers and congregations. Apparently. He has difficulty in getting this done well.” Not a how-to-do-it book. Pennington’s sprightly text stresses the primacy of preaching for the preacher and quickly adds that it needs the help of the laity, too. He thinks that after several decades of deemphasis, preaching is now regaining attention. He sees evidence of a renewed interest among the laity.

The title alone would have gotten me to open the book; the second half alone would have convinced me to buy it. “Preaching as a Creative Event” presents not only exciting challenges of theory but also practical hints on being creative and effective in communicating the Gospel.

Want something with a heavier touch? A little more theologically oriented? When I picked up The Word and the Words I expected to find a dry volume that belonged at the bottom of the stacks—permanently. I tried to skim through it. Then I hit the chapter entitled “Word—Liturgical and Sacramental.” Morris had hooked me.

Morris writes with an eye on trends in the Church. He’s not pessimistic (nor is he overly optimistic or naïve) in defending proclamation. He writes zealously and warmly, aware of the perils but excited about the task. He shows little interest in the scaffolding. Many books on preaching devote a whole chapter to using a full manuscript, another to using notes. Morris dismisses the whole question with one cogent paragraph: the method used isn’t particularly significant. More important is what results.

Here’s a person who’s immersed in the writings of John (Honest-to-God) Robinson and many of the other major voices of the past and present generations, who knows the criticisms of preaching, and who still finds the task worthwhile. He states at the beginning that he has written a defense of classical preaching. Don’t let that throw you off. His freshness throughout the book is appealing.

Change a few phrases into Protestant jargon and you have a remarkably able defense for all spiritual heirs of Martin Luther in James Reese’s Preaching God’s Burning Word. Reese heavily accents experiencing the Word. And we Protestants thought we had that cornered!

Regrettably, the book is written for the theologically literate and is not within the vocabulary range of the average reader. Reese shows an excellent understanding of current scholarship and the status of textual criticism. He discusses the new quest for the historical Jesus and the new hermeneutic with clarity. Yet he holds a conservative position. His final chapters, dealing with Jesus, parables, and the trinitarian experience, are handled well and were for me the best part of the book.

For help in telling stories from the pulpit. I recommend Louis Paul Lehman’s Put a Door on It. He thinks that great teachers and preachers have always been great storytellers. This is more than a book about illustrations, but Lehman does give all the how steps (collecting, classifying, and so on). He knows what’s happening in the field of communication. Although he doesn’t quote directly from the researchers, he clearly incorporates the principles. And he sprinkles helpful hints throughout this short, extremely practical book.

How refreshing to read that “personal experience is the simplest, most believable, and, therefore, the most effective illustration.” Preachers of a bygone day insisted on hiding themselves so that only Jesus showed. But Lehman realizes (as Brooks told us in the past century) that preaching is truth through personality.

Herbert Lockyer’s The Art and Craft of Preaching reads well and abounds in short quotes and pithy remarks. It also sounds like a book written around the mid-fifties.

There’s nothing very original or exciting here. Like Lehman. Loekyer takes a very conservative stance. But unlike Lehman, he concentrates on peripheral areas—pulpit dress, gestures, and the like. He seems unaware of current discussion in either communications or biblical scholarship.

Erdahl begins each chapter of Preaching For the People with a dialogue between the listener and the preacher. Good idea, but a little strained; I was sometimes wearied by the winding path the listener took to make his points.

That’s the most damaging charge I can make. This book reads like a simple teaching/learning text for homiletics. Erdahl pulls it off nicely by his clarity. He shows the sermon process through easy steps. Following the formula of the older texts, he walks through a sermon from the point of selection of text to the full manuscript, and he handles that extremely well. He includes samples of how to conduct sessions on feedback and “feedforward” for congregational involvement.

If I were looking for a good text on preaching, Sweazey’s Preaching the Good News would demand serious consideration. Sweazey knows his field, and his writing flows smoothly.

Although his chapter on authority is helpful, he doesn’t really get to the pertinent questions of today on this subject. He presents the classical answers but ignores the contemporary questions.

However, on his chapters dealing with communication theory, words, and humor (which he encourages), grade this professor an A plus. He’s up with current thought in communication but maintains a solid, biblical stance. Don’t pass over his briefly annotated bibliography at the end. He has the good material catalogued. This is a very helpful volume for those who want to read about better preaching.

Good Reading For Election Year

Toward a Biblical View of Civil Government, by Robert Duncan Culver (Moody, 1974, 308 pp., $6.95), is reviewed by Robert G. Clouse, professor of history, Indiana State University, Terre Haute.

This volume is an attempt by an evangelical scholar to supply a “biblical-theological” basis for a Christian’s relationship to the state. Culver brings to his task a wide range of experience and training; in addition to his pastoral ministry, he has been a professor at such schools as Wheaton College, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and Grace Seminary. He presents a general doctrinal view, heavily informed by Calvinist theology, in the first section of the book, and then outlines scriptural teaching in the Old and New Testaments that relates to the state.

Culver’s explanations of Scripture are thorough, balanced, and extremely helpful. However, his last chapter contains a series of conclusions that are rather indefinite, given the trend of some of his glosses on the biblical text. As he states: “The Scriptures do not speak directly or distinctly to every human situation. The present search of the Scriptures has, for example, turned up no texts which tell believers exactly what to do if, as happened in Virginia about two hundred years ago, the authorities in the local area (Virginia House of Burgesses) declare the area out of the jurisdiction of the central authorities (king and parliament). Quite aside from the question of enlisting in the revolutionary armies, whom should they obey?… Again, what text speaks specifically on how much public welfare is sufficient to absolve the civil structure of its obligation to the honest poor, yet not so much as to degrade those poor to the point that they give up efforts at helping themselves?”

The responses to these and other questions are really given in the textual comments in the earlier chapters in a more definite way. The author’s approach is basically conservative, and his answers to these questions would lead to a Tory position in the case of the Revolutionary War and a welfare payment system so small as to degrade the “honest poor” (whoever they are) even further. Culver’s conservatism leads him to argue for corporal punishment for criminals and to suggest that capitalism is taught in the Bible. In the course of the book he directs a number of remarks against “social scientists,” disparages liberal democracy, and airs some rather extreme opinions against public education.

Culver states several times that he does not wish to use a historical approach but relies solely on the Scriptures. Perhaps this is why he does not come to terms with the world in the last third of the twentieth century. His quietistic approach does not begin to comprehend the problems of the technological statism of our era.

Despite these weaknesses, it is encouraging to have this volume available in an election year. Anyone who values Holy Scripture would do well to read it. Evangelicals have been too eager to proceed, as does Culver, with statements that may seem noncommittal on politics (“Toward a Biblical View”) but in reality support a conservative approach that bolsters the status quo. This election year it will not be so easy to equate God, the new birth, and the Bible with political conservatism.

BRIEFLY NOTED

A new study Bible—the product of a cooperative venture by Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish scholars—has recently been published by Oxford University Press: The New English Bible with the Apocrypha: Oxford Study Edition (1,728 pp., $14.95, $8.95 pb), edited by Samuel Sandmel, M. Jack Suggs, and Arnold Tkacik. The format is that of standard study editions. Each book is introduced briefly, passages are succinctly annotated by exegetical comments, and there are extensive cross references. In addition, a number of special articles concerning how to study the Bible, the literary forms in Scripture, biblical history and geography, and chronology are appended to the text. However, there is no danger that this volume will be confused with Oxford’s long-established Scofield Reference Bible! Though claiming to represent biblical scholarship as a whole and a broad religious spectrum, the viewpoint is consistently “liberal” (both critically and theologically) and will probably be offensive to most conservative Jews, evangelical Protestants, and charismatic Catholics—in short, most of the people who seem to be studying the Bible these days. However, the OSE contains enough of value for mature students to use it along with other works.

The Pentecostal-charismatic view of tongues and the Holy Spirit is so well represented that we need to remember there is an alternative approach to these crucial matters. Here are some: Be Filled With the Spirit by Lehman Strauss (Zondervan, 125 pp., $1.50 pb), Truth About Tongues by Hugh Pyle (Accent [Box 15337, Denver, Colo. 80215], 128 pp., $1.75 pb), and The Battle For Your Bible: A Study of Experience Versus Scripture by Raymond Saxe (Grace Bible Publications [1300 S. Maple Rd., Ann Arbor, Mich. 48103], 132 pp., n.p., pb).

More than 200 books and audio-visuals on dying, bereavement, funerals, and the like from nearly 100 publishers are classified and annotated in The Thanatology Library by Roberta Halp*rn (Highly Specialized Promotions [Box 989, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11202], 36 pp., $1 pb). A wide range of religious and secular approaches are represented.

Two new practical guides to group Bible study: Miracles Happen in Group Bible Study, by Albert Wollen (Regal, 127 pp., $2.95 pb) and Bible Study Can Be Exciting!, by Mary Garvin (Zondervan, 143 pp., $2.95). Creating an Intentional Ministry comprises a dozen essays aimed at ministers in these times of changing roles. The editor is John Biersdorf (Abingdon, 237 pp., $5.75 pb). Sample essays: “Getting a Job,” “Women in Ministry,” “Goal-Setting and Evaluation.”

Careers in the Christian Ministry (Consortium Books [Box 9001, Wilmington, N.C. 28401], 289 pp., $12) may be of a little help for those considering serving as (or curious about) pastors, missionaries, teachers, social workers, monks, and bishops in the Roman Catholic and certain ecumenically oriented Protestant denominations. Evangelicals will find much more value in When God Calls You, by Edward Deratany (Nelson, 206 pp., $3.95 pb). It is possible, of course, to be a minister and be engaged in secular work. Many ethnic and evangelistic groups have a long tradition of self-supporting ministers, but now about one-fifth of those ordained in “mainline” denominations are self-supporting. Two dozen examples, mostly Episcopal, are presented in Case Histories of Tentmakers, edited by James Lowery, Jr. (Morehouse-Barlow [78 Danbury Rd., Wilton, Conn 06897], 84 pp., $3.50 pb).

Two “how-to-do-it” books on leading a congregation’s ministry of music: New Directions for a Musical Church by Peter Stapleton, a white Episcopalian (John Knox, 144 pp., $3.95 pb), and O Sing Unto the Lord a New Song by Willie Eva Smith, a black Baptist (Vantage, 73 pp., $4.95).

Both armchair travelers and ordinary Bible readers will warmly appreciate the vibrant recreation of life in the world of the apostle Paul by Ernle Bradford in Paul the Traveller (Macmillan. 246 pp., $9.95), written in the tradition of H. V. Morton. Rulers of New Testament Times and Cities in New Testament Times, both by Charles Ludwig (Accent [Box 15337, Denver, Colo. 80215], 128 pp., $2.25 each), fail to come up to the same standard of excellence but do provide interesting reading.

Popular testimonies of evangelical conversion and its aftereffects continually appear. Three are by men tormented by fiery accidents: The God Explosion in My Life, by Ted Anderson, an ex-criminal (Tyndale, 234 pp., $1.95 pb); Tested by Fire, by singer Merrill Womach and his wife Virginia (Revell, 128 pp., $4.95); and Burned to Life, by race-car driver Mel Kenyon (New Leaf, 128 pp., $4.95).

The poor who are with us always are not therefore to be ignored but rather present continual opportunities for service. Three books providing information on the poor in America and on ways to help are The Church and the Rural Poor, edited by James Cogsweli (John Knox, 107 pp., $1.95 pb). Poverty Profile USA by Mariellen Procopia and Frederick Perella, Jr. (Paulist, 88 pp., $1 pb), and The Catholic Church and the American Poor by George Kelly (Alba, 206 pp., $5.95).

I will not perform the wedding ceremony for persons who are not, both by profession and by practice, Christians. Because of this, I have been regarded by some as a strange sort of clerical animal, unkind at best, cruel at worst. Yet no matter what the reaction, my convictions are firm.

How did I reach this position? Partly through the realization that a very large percentage of the marriages I had performed had ended in divorce! At the outset of my ministry, I married any couple who asked me to do so. I counseled them before the wedding. Courtesies were exchanged among all concerned. The manners were well polished both in the study and in the sanctuary. However, often something disastrous happened after all the hoopla died down. As time passed—in some cases only a brief time—the vows and prayers of the ceremony were forgotten, and the marriage crumbled.

This happened time and time again among those who had little or no real spiritual commitment to begin with. I was pressed to the conclusion that I was wrong in officiating at a wedding of two unbelievers.

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed a charade. Was I called of God to perform marriages for people in the house of the Lord when those persons had not committed their lives to the Lord? Was I to say prayers for two people who did not pray? Was I to read passages from the Bible to a bride and groom knowing full well that they did not intend to build their home upon that Bible? Was I to ask these two people to utter their promises in the presence of Jesus when they did not regard Jesus as the Lord of their lives? Was I to conclude the ceremony by earnestly beseeching God’s blessing upon their new life together when they were not founding that life on the rock of salvation? They gave the Almighty only a nod of attention day in and day out; but on their special day, I, the man of God, was to call forth heavenly beatitudes upon their future.

Enough of this, I decided. I was being used. God was being used. The church and the truths the church stood for were being used. What the couples wanted out of it all was the beauty of the sanctuary, the noble sound of the organ, the dignified image of the clergyman, the luxury and respectability of a “church wedding.”

What if I allowed a person to be baptized, knowing full well that he did not profess Jesus as Saviour? What if I told the congregation that anyone could receive communion, whether or not he was committed to Christ? What if I accepted into church membership anyone, no matter what he thought about the doctrines of the body of Christ? I would be asked to leave my pulpit. The governing session of the congregation would not stand for a minister with such a loose regard for those things held sacred. Yet I could go on year after year performing weddings that apparently were little more than hollow recitations of time-honored words.

My conclusion jelled when I reread in a new light the plain words of Second Corinthians 6:14: “Do not be mismated with unbelievers. For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” (RSV). I realized that I had been partner to “mismating.” I had joined light with darkness. And I had more times than not joined darkness with darkness.

Now when I perform a wedding, it is a time for genuine rejoicing in the Spirit of God. All persons gathered in the sanctuary know that the two being brought together are dedicated to the Lord. What a glad time it is, and what a peaceful time for me, the officiating clergyman! My prayers are sent to God with a new sense of earnestness. The Scriptures are read to the worshipers with the knowledge that the bride and groom have grounded their lives upon the Book. The vows are taken with the understanding that God is entering as a third party into those promises. And my conscience is clear before all concerned. When the last amen is said in that ceremony, one can sense the spiritual excitement of those gathered in the house of prayer. I would never go back to the old practice of performing marriages only because I thought I was expected to do it as a part of my job.

Some fellow ministers ask if I am missing witnessing opportunities because of my policy. But I do have an opportunity to witness. When asked to marry a couple, I invite them to come for a talk. When we meet I confront them with the forgiveness and new life that Jesus offers, asking them if they will become disciples of the Lord. At that moment the encounter with God is established. If they respond negatively, then I kindly state that I can go no further, for my first obligation is to see that they are saved. If they refuse that salvation, then I cannot in good conscience proceed.

If they respond positively, then I congratulate them, pray for them, give them a Bible and Christian literature, tell them of the times of our church services, and invite them to attend. And I tell them that six months hence I will be glad to perform their wedding if they are still living daily for Christ, are active in the church, are spending time in prayer and Scripture reading.

The divorce rate keeps on increasing. One out of three marriages in the country ends in divorce (two out of three in California). But according to a study cited by Billy Graham, one out of forty marriages ends in divorce when parents attend church regularly, and only one out of four hundred ends in divorce when both parents with their children attend church regularly and maintain family devotions.

I have a feeling that I am on the right biblical track—for the good of the people, the good of sound doctrine, and the good of my own conscience. And the marriages performed since I adopted this policy will bear me out.—J. GRANT SWANK, JR., pastor, Church of the Nazarene, Fishkill, New York.

A friend in the United States sends us a brown box filled with little brown packets of vegetable seeds every year. The harvest descriptions are tantalizing: “dark green, succulent flesh, tender when cooked a short time, the best of all bush beans”; “super-sweet corn, crunchy, and tender, stays sweet a long time after picking”; “lettuce with delicious flavor, small, loosely folded heads.” One sits and imagines the pleasure of seeing the plants show the first mist of green lines above the dark soil, of hoeing and watering at sunset, of admiring the lush growth as time goes on, of harvesting luscious vegetables.

Days go by. Weeks go by. A brown box full of brown packets of seeds sits in a cupboard in our Swiss mountain home. Imagining gardening does nothing to produce a real crop. Rain and sun can do no good to seeds that remain in the cupboard! And suddenly there comes a day when we put all else aside to begin the planting.

The ground needs preparation. The “false plants” need to be weeded out first, and the ground dug up. And empty prepared ground doesn’t remain empty long. If the good seeds stay in packets, false seeds will blow in, creep in from nearby plants, be carried in by gusts of rain. The empty waiting ground can quickly be filled with a heavy crop of weeds.

“Hearken: behold, there went out a sower to sow.” Jesus in Mark 4:3 begins his parable with this most important step. There has to be a belief that the seed is valid seed, such as is described on the packet, but then there has to come action to get it into the ground. Jesus leaves no doubt as to what the seed is: verse 14, “The sower soweth the word”; verse 15, “where the word is sown”; verse 17, “when affliction or persecution ariseth for the word’s sake”; verse 18, “such as hear the word”; verse 20, “such as hear the word, and receive it, and bring forth fruit.” The seed is the Word of God. We can’t be mixed up about what it is we are supposed to sow. This is an amazing seed, one that does not mildew or rot: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand forever.”

As I knelt to plant my beans, I found a few seeds had been split and torn. These had no possibility of putting down roots or sending up the first two important leaves. The seed must be intact. The Word of God, too, is a complete unit. The Bible as a marvelous whole, with portions given in the context of the whole, is to be “sown” as the Word of God. It is this whole Word of God that is spoken of in Isaiah 55 as the moisture that waters the planted earth: “For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth; it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it” (Isa. 55:10, 11).

What a great responsibility falls upon us who have been given this knowledge, and have been given the Word, the seed. We need to be very sensitive to the direction of the Master Gardener, who has promised to give us directions as to where we are to do our sowing. How tragic to leave fertile earth empty in the season of growth.

When are we to sow? “I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. They shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:1–4). The season is always spring in this command. And what is to be “sown” is truth—“thy word is true from the beginning” (Ps. 119:160). Paul writes in this passage in Second Timothy that people will turn their ears away from the truth. What a picture of today! We need to get on with planting.

But there is a second planting that is equally important. I am a seed. You are a seed. “Verily, verily, I say unto you. Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). The falling into the ground has to take place first. “What do I do next? I need guidance.” “Fall into the ground and die.” A given order, a given form. Over and over again we need to “die” to self, to ambition, to pride—and also to humbleness, which can suddenly slip into a different kind of pride.

The need to fall into the ground and die is the need to be willing for anything that is God’s plan for us. At times it is the willingness to be unseen or unheard, to be buried in an African village or an Indiana farmhouse, in a schoolroom or a doctor’s reception room, in a noisy market place or a quiet office. The need to be buried to one’s own dreams and desires, one’s own plans and preferences, occurs over and over again in life. The “sacrifice” can be very real at the point it is made, but in an unnoticed way that very same attitude of sacrifice can later slip into a kind of pride, an attitude of, “Look how humble I am,” or “Look how well I am suffering.”

But we can be planted over and over again. Alone with the Master Gardener we can say, “Put me into the ground. Lord. In this set of circ*mstances, may I be really a grain of corn; may I be dead to that which would spoil my fruitfulness. You bring forth what comes next. Lord.” And the sower becomes the seed—so that he or she can go on sowing seed!

EDITH SCHAEFFER

The Sweat War Escalates

I consider myself somewhat of a jock. I try to play a little racquetball, a couple of sets of tennis, and a few games of basketball whenever I can. I run some. I swim some. I’ve tried aerobics, the “bull-worker,” and when I was in grade school I even invested in a mail-order bodybuilding course. It didn’t work.

I also watch televised sports. I sat glued to the tube during the Olympics. I enjoyed them immensely. But after reading my morning paper, I’ve decided I’ve had enough. The Olympics have got to change and they’ve got to change now. Or I may boycott them in 1980 (I bet the Russians would be stung by that!).

What lit my fire today was a quote from Arnie Robinson, the long jumper from the United States who won the gold medal. After he had given his wife much deserved credit for putting up with him throughout four years of training, he said: “Unless the government steps in and helps out athletes, by 1980 we’re really gonna get killed. You think we’re doing badly here, we won’t win half as many medals in Moscow. We’re way behind. I think our government is wealthy enough to give the top five or six athletes in different events, maybe the first ten, $10,000 a year to live on. We need that and we need training sites and coaches. Our coaches are far below those in other countries.

The Olympics have become the Sweat War (as opposed to cold and hot wars). What was originally designed to be an event in which athletes from around the world gathered to compete in an atmosphere of brotherhood and good will has now become a giant political/propaganda campaign. And Arnie Robinson thinks he has the answer for the United States—Escalate!

But I wonder if Arnie, in the midst of his long jumping, had time to count the number of events in the Olympics. I did. I went back to my July 19 Sports Illustrated (I subscribe and save them too—can my jockness be doubted now?) and counted 196 separate events, some of which involved teams. Does Arnie want us to pay 10 people x 196 events x $10,000 plus provide coaches, salaries, training facilities, and so on? That’s $ 19,600,000-plus.

Perhaps Robinson wasn’t planning to subsidize those athletes in “1000 meter kayak fours” or “small-bore rifle three positions.” But I don’t think we should discriminate, do you, Arnie?

Besides … who cares which country wins what? I don’t feel humiliated when the Hungarians win water polo. I don’t think we should nationalize that game! Who cares if the East Germans want to spend millions of dollars and people-hours producing champions? Who cares if the American girls don’t want to lift weights to prepare themselves properly for swimming victories because they’re afraid they’ll lose their femininity? If they’d rather preserve femininity than gold medals, I couldn’t care less.

Let’s put the games in perspective.

Let’s return them to the athletes and the fans and forget the politicians. Banish overt nationalism. Do away with the flagraising and anthems after each medal. Support the athletes with some government aid so they can compete in the Olympics and other international games, but let’s not subsidize athletics a la Robinson. If we do, hard-working long jumpers won’t have their wives to thank. And I’m all for wife appreciation.

EUTYCHUS VII

Ever A Challenge

Just a word here to express my thanks for the entire issue of June 18, particularly the needed and well-expressed, “Must We Devastate to Deliver,” by William H. Willimon. There are few pastors, I believe, that have not had people come to them in real frustration because they simply could not find in themselves the self-abasem*nt, and the (to them) phoniness of claiming to be nothings in order to become and be “true Christians.” And there are also those whose lifestyle and approach to their fellows have been far above any reasonable reproach [and who] find the often fantastic stories of conversions from utter degradation and vileness so far removed from their own experience that they question their own faith.… “Social Concerns in Christian Missions” by Richard V. Pierard was excellent, though I do hope the word in the opening sentence is “carriers,” instead of “barriers,” for if not, I think I have lost my ability to read this English.… CHRISTIANITY TODAY is ever a challenge, and occasionally you seem to outdo yourself in speaking to me—so this note to urge you to keep up the good work, a lot of us here in our various fields depend on it!

GEORGE C. WESTEFELDT

Zion Congregational Church

Lind, Wash.

•The word in question should have been “bearers.”—ED.

To Cancel And Remove

This is it! When I saw the [advertisem*nts] in your magazine with regard to Mr. Carter, I decided that I have had enough of your magazine. I am evangelical but I am positively not supporting Carter in his “sheep in wolves’ clothing” campaign for the White House. And I refuse to have your magazine place such publicity before me. Therefore, I wish to be removed from your mailing list, your publicity list, your advertisem*nt list, and please, forthwith, cancel all remaining issues of CHRISTIANITY TODAY coming to my address

RAYMOND T. MORELAND

The United Methodist Church

Mt. Carmel-New Market, Md.

As a subscriber to your conservative (?) magazine for many years, I am wondering about the two Carter ads in the July 16 issue. It surely sounds to me that you are endorsing Jimmy Carter for president. These ads are the first political ads that I remember seeing in your magazine, but there may have been others.

I think these ads—which must have been written before the acceptance speech—very highly overrate Jimmy Carter. Especially the one which advertises “The Miracle of Jimmy Carter.” The spiritual odyssey of Jimmy Carter? Maybe spiritual “oddity” would be more fitting. Isn’t it odd that a man with such a spiritual reputation never once mentioned God, or Christ, or prayer, or spoke of his need of God’s guidance, in his acceptance speech?…

I think you should be more careful in your political advertising—in fact, I wonder if you should accept such ads? These may not be an endorsem*nt, but they do indicate your approval. I am a Republican, but I am prepared to vote as the Lord leads me regardless of party.

(MRS.) PHYLLIS C. REISIG

Spring Valley, Calif.

•When an insurance company runs an ad in Time Magazine, it does not mean that the magazine endorses that company over others. Nor did our accepting the advertisem*nts of the evangelical group “Citizens for Carter” and of the Logos book about Carter mean that we are promoting Carter. We would also accept advertising of evangelicals for, or a book about, the Republican candidates.—ED.

Special Privilege?

Having just read the June 18 issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, I am appalled at the … control Dr. Carl F. H. Henry has been given. In the letters section he was permitted to give his rebuttal … to two letters from different seminary professors. Seemingly, he is privileged to “have the last word.”

In his review of Senator Mark Hatfield’s book he [preaches] mini-sermons, [offers] his own exegesis in compact form, and [concludes] by telling us what “the Christian knows.” This … does not seem in keeping … with the high quality which CHRISTIANITY TODAY has attempted to attain.

AL LUSTIE

First Baptist Church

Ellensburg, Wash.

Hunger Reaction

Congratulations on your July 16 issue with its outstanding emphasis on the thoroughly biblical concerns of poverty and hunger. It should do much to heighten evangelical awareness of these worldwide problems and lead to personal action regarding them.

FRANK E. GAEBELEIN

Arlington, Va.

In contrast to the usual scholarly style of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, the issue on hunger was a disappointment.… As an agricultural economist, I must … ask … how would the suggested changes be transcribed into more food in the hands of poor nations. In “A Case Against Waste and Other Excesses” how would eating less meat and less marbled beef result in more food for poor nations? A lower meat demand would likely result only in less meat produced and with lower meat and grain prices. Again, the linkage to poor nations is obscure. The article states, “If the immense quantity of grain saved were distributed to hungry people around the world it could prevent starvation world wide.” This may be true, at least in the short run, but how do you get the distribution? Eating less meat in itself won’t do it. Additionally, it could be argued that rich nations waste resources in more foolish ways than through their eating habits—such as in big cars, liquor, etc.

“Mischief by Statute” describes international trade patterns, resource use, and eating patterns as “social evils.” Designating these economic manifestations of economic development as “social evils” may make things simpler but no light is shed by so doing. Would the food balances in poor nations be better by changing international trade patterns? No, not without revolutionary sacrifices from rich to poor nations and that is something else. Would less resource use (also less resource development) by rich nations benefit hungry nations or similarly a change in eating patterns? No, not in themselves and in all of these the capacity to really help could be reduced by doing so.

The biblical challenges regarding the feeding of the poor in relation to preaching the gospel could well stand a scrutinizing examination. The manner in which it might be done as a Christian response is another question. Is the State Department an agency of … Christianity?

In any event, if long-run aid solutions are found, in whatever form they take, direct sacrifices of a large nature would need to be made by rich nations. This would involve more than not eating well-marbled meat.

GLENN A. HELMERS

Lincoln, Nebr.

Hypocrisy? Or simply inconsistency? The apparent concern for the hungry as expressed on the front cover—an excellent illustration—stands in marked contrast with the advertisem*nt about “being a successful Christian businessman” on the back cover. Sitting on a fence in high winds is perilous, not to mention obnoxious. Stand on the side of the poor, or you will fall.

GORDON HOUSER

Newton, Kans.

You have done a significant service for the churches with your special issue on hunger and poverty. I hope you’ll do an occasional follow-up article so that you will keep us all reminded that the problem will be with us for a long time.

W. STANLEY MOONEYHAM

President

World Vision International

Monrovia, Calif.