Page 5005 – Christianity Today (2024)

As movie ratings mean less and less, Christians must develop their own discernment.

The frustration of serious filmmakers over the shortcomings of the ratings system is now reaching the boiling point. Serious films given a deserved X are written off by theater owners as hassle-inducing pornography. Faced with the financial ruin of an X rating, producers of such controversial films as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer; and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! have opted to ignore the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and release them unrated to theaters. All three movies have enjoyed critical and financial success. If this trend continues, the entire rating system could go by the wayside.

The MPAA rating system—G through X—is increasingly criticized by both filmmakers and moviegoers as misleading and ineffectual. Many filmmakers regard the system as a capricious and arbitrary obstacle, an attempt to censor their art. Its intent was to avoid government censorship by indicating the content and moral tone of movies. Now, however, concerned parents often find the ratings system useless in determining the suitability of a movie for their children. The fact that filmmakers are more and more ignoring the MPAA entirely by releasing unrated films and videotapes is prompting an outcry of protest from parents and the pulpit.

But censorship and ratings systems have always fallen into the trap of illogical checklists. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho—one of the most psychologically horrifying films of all times—was screened to general theater audiences and plays unedited on television. Studio censors did not object to the knife murder of a woman in the shower—as long as the knife was not actually shown penetrating her flesh. Her nude, lifeless body could be shown—as long as her buttocks, genitals, and breasts were not revealed.

Indeed, Hitchcock understood that the impact of the movie was not dependent simply on blood or nudity but on the moral tone of the world view underpinning it. Hitchcock’s personal loathing of women, and his fascination with their torture and humiliation, reached a wide audience because he played the studio’s game. His final movie, Frenzy, was released in 1972 with an R rating. But even with its revoltingly graphic portrayal of sexual violence, Frenzy would probably earn a PG if submitted to the MPAA today.

Changing Values

The MPAA ratings were designed to rate movie content against general, mainstream values. But values change from place to place and year to year. Thus the ratings system has changed, and the blame cannot be placed entirely on the movie industry. Its plan to create a range of categories—G, PG, R, and X—was intended to allow for differentiation between movies. But as moviegoers avoided both G and X films, producers lost huge amounts of money. In spite of the availability of four increments, the overwhelming majority of films soon fell into the two commercially profitable ones: PG and R.

For example, when Star Wars and Chariots of Fire were initially given G ratings, the panicked filmmakers inserted just enough profanity to bump them up to a more financially promising PG.

The X rating initially meant that a film was not suitable for children. In 1969 the X-rated Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and John Voight, won the Academy Award for best picture. Its X rating was appropriate, because the story of a male prostitute was not something kids needed to see. Likewise, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel, A Clockwork Orange, was rated X. Now, however, both films have been rerated R, and without the benefit of any editing. What did change was how the X rating was interpreted.

Pushing The Limits

Pornographers began labeling their hard-core films X or XXX. The stigma of an X rating led filmmakers to push the limits of the R category. An R began to include more sexually and violently explicit scenes—movies that previously would have been rated R were now PG.

The R rating became a catchall for serious, social-issues movies such as El Norte and The Killing Fields, soft-core pornography such as Emanuelle, and mad-slasher/rape fantasies such as I Spit on Your Grave—any movie that stopped short of graphic, gynecological detail. Directors began “shooting X and cutting to a hot R”: They submitted their explicit films for rating, then cut just enough for them to be rerated R. The R rating that had been intended for mature films that ought not be seen by unaccompanied minors now included soft-core pornography. Not surprisingly, many parents began writing off all R-rated films as gratuitous sex and violence, while the X rating became the exclusive province of hard-core pornography. G virtually ceased to exist, while PG evolved into a grab bag of kiddy films and near-R adult movies.

With virtually all films, from Disney to dismemberment, squeezed into PG and R categories, parents were left with virtually no sense of what might be suitable for their children. Into this milieu stepped Steven Spielberg, who prevailed upon the MPAA to create the PG-13 category when his Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom received an R for, among other things, a scene where a man’s heart is ripped from his chest. Targeting the film for kids and young adults, Spielberg feared an R rating would alienate parents—and result in a weak box office.

Compounding the confusion were the pressure tactics of activist groups, which actually worked against their own basic goal: to keep their kids out of immoral, graphically explicit movies. The confusion over the X rating meant that theater owners were confronted by pickets and angry phone calls when they screened X-rated movies. Newspapers refused to run ads for X films. But rather than being banished from the theaters, explicit movies were released with R ratings after the filmmakers had made only minor cuts. Teenagers who could not get into an 18-orover X film, could now slip past the ticket booth to see a less-rigorously enforced R. Thoughtless parents could now take their small children to the R version.

Among the films transformed in this ratings change were Angel Heart, a Faustian tale of murder and rape, which went from X to R after losing only 10 seconds of a surrealistic sequence in which the stars copulate under a shower of blood; and Scandal, which lost a few seconds of an orgy scene to qualify for its R. Both films are now available in uncut, unrated videotape versions. Had these videos been released under an X rating, kids would have a tough time renting them.

In Quest Of A New Level

TV critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have recommended the addition of a new A rating. This A rating would mean “adults only,” and it would be copyrighted to protect it from pornographers’ attempts to exploit it. It would differentiate serious adult films from pornography and sexploitation, which would still carry a self-imposed X or XXX. By removing the stigma of pornography, adult films could thus be restricted to those 18 or over without insuring financial disaster. The danger in this is that if protesters prevailed upon theaters and newspapers to reject A-rated films, the situation would revert to the present chaos.

While Siskel and Ebert’s idea may be workable, it still falls short of fully informing parents about a movie’s content and impact: Simple categories are severely limited in their ability to describe. Checklists can offer broad, general guidelines, but they cannot really inform on a deep level.

In the long run, trying to ban films will probably backfire. The film industry competes in a free market for the public’s entertainment dollars. In fact, expecting an industry that has largely been abandoned by Christians to produce entertainment based on biblical standards is a pipe dream. And if history provides any lessons, we could expect protests against X- or A-rated films to result in those same films being released as R or unrated.

An expanded ratings system may be a positive step. But what would be more helpful is for parents to study film reviews critically for themselves instead of looking to checklists, one- to four-star ratings, or a superficial thumbs-up/thumbs-down judgment. Reading and analyzing several reviews of the same film usually gives a pretty clear sense of the film’s moral tone.

Newspaper and magazine writers are quite responsive to readers’ positive comments. Letters of encouragement and appreciation to reviewers who deal with moral and ethical issues would reinforce the need for discerning critiques and would accomplish more good than picketing theaters.

Rather than trying to change the film industry and moviegoing public, Christians would do well to develop the critical and analytical skills needed to guide their own children through the moral pitfalls of the popular culture. Working with, rather than against, an expanded rating system would also be helpful. The more information parents can obtain, the better able they will be to guide wisely.

Does the Holocaust change the context for Christian evangelization of the Jews?

When thousands of evangelical pastors, theologians, teachers, and other Christian leaders gathered at Lausanne II in Manila last year, the outcome was a significant theological declaration, the Manila Manifesto. Lausanne II’s highly professional press office issued daily releases about developments during the ten days of meetings.

Just months before, a small group of 15 evangelical scholars met in Willowbank, Bermuda, under the sponsorship of the World Evangelical Fellowship, to draft a two-page, theological document on the appropriateness of Christians evangelizing Jews. The gathering did not enjoy the services of a full-time press office.

Guess which group got more press coverage?

Journalists, after all, love a fight. The Manila Manifesto looked like a lot of gray prose, and religious prose at that. There is no story in theology.

However, when Rabbi A. James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee deplored the “Willowbank Declaration on the Christian Gospel and the Jewish People” as nothing less than “a blueprint for spiritual genocide,” religion reporters all across the country knew that they would not have to cover parish bake sales that week.

Why did the Willowbank Declaration receive such a heated response? Why did Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the Holy Land Fellowship of Christians and Jews lament that the document sets Christian thinking on Judaism back 20 years?

A look at the theological trends that prompted the Willowbank Declaration provides the answer. Such trends were summarized in the declaration’s preamble:

Some church leaders have retreated from embracing the task of evangelizing Jews as a responsibility of Christian mission. Rather, a new theology is being embraced which holds that God’s covenant with Israel through Abraham establishes all Jews in God’s favor for all times, and so makes faith in Jesus Christ for salvation needless so far as they are concerned.

This “new theology” (which is not all that new) is sometimes called “two-covenant theology”; much of it has grown out of the work of scholars involved in regular meetings of Jews and Christians over the last 20 years in what is sometimes called Jewish-Christian “encounter” or “dialogue.”

A Retreat From Evangelization?

Even a brief survey of the literature produced by these theologians shows that the Willowbank Declaration’s assessment of the theological state of affairs is polite understatement. Many church leaders and theologians have not only “retreated from embracing the task of evangelizing Jews,” they have vehemently condemned the traditional understanding of the person and work of Christ that undergirds evangelicalism.

Consider these examples:

• Protestant theologian Paul Van Buren has argued that Christians should not confront Jews with the gospel because for Christians—let alone for Jews—Jesus is not really the Messiah promised in the Old Testament, though he is the “Christ of the Church.”

• Rosemary Radford Ruether, whose Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism is a seminal work in modern literature on Jewish-Christian relations, contends that the New Testament’s own explanations of the meaning of Jesus’ suffering and death are anti-Jewish at their core, especially those of the Gospel and epistles of John. Ruether asserts that “anti-Judaism is the left hand of Christology.”

• A. Roy Eckardt, author of Jews and Christians: The Contemporary Meeting and other studies, has suggested that the doctrine of the Resurrection must be dropped from the credo if we are ever to correct the classical Christian distortion of Judaism.

• New Testament scholar Raymond E. Brown advises that the “anti-Jewish” passages in the Gospel of John be retained for public reading, but only if the readings are followed by sermons that insist that the attitude of the apostle is wrong for Christians today.

While all these positions have not been formally endorsed by American denominations, the theological framework has been accepted by many. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, and the Episcopal Church have all produced statements in the past two years that are informed by the two-covenant perspective.

“Two-covenant-communities theology” might be a better label, because these theologians argue in one form or another that we must understand Judaism as a divinely guided religion that is parallel to Christianity, not superseded by it or fulfilled within it. Christians ought not to try to convert Jews; that would be asking them to deny their election as members of the continuing covenant community of Israel.

Meanwhile, the covenant community of the church faces a huge problem, these theologians say. Christianity is “infected” with radical anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, the source of which is the New Testament itself. Much of the New Testament is seen as motivated by “a polemic against the Jews and Judaism,” the necessity of which arose when the followers of Jesus were disappointed with the failure of Christ to usher in the kingdom of God as they had expected. As Ruether summarizes:

At the root of this dispute lies a fundamentally different understanding of the Messianic idea that developed in Christianity.… Judaism looked to the Messianic coming as a public, world-historical event which unequivocally overthrew the forces of evil in the world and established the reign of God. Originally Christianity also understood Jesus’ Messianic role in terms of an imminent occurrence of the coming reign of God. But when this event failed to materialize, Christianity pushed it off into an indefinite future, that is, the second coming, and reinterpreted Jesus’ Messianic role in inward and personal ways that had little resemblance to what the Jewish tradition meant by the coming of the Messiah. An impasse developed between Christianity and Judaism, rooted in Christian claims to Messianic fulfillment and supersession of Judaism, that were not only unacceptable but incomprehensible in the Jewish tradition.

New Testament Christology, soteriology, and (worst of all) its ways of interpreting the Old Testament were thus infused with this idea of supersession, and “the teaching of contempt” of Judaism and hence of the Jews. Franklin H. Littell, in The Crucifixion of the Jews, blames supersessionism for the Holocaust: “The cornerstone of Christian Antisemitism is the superseding or displacement myth, which already rings with the genocidal note.”

In much of the literature generated by Jewish-Christian dialogue, the Holocaust stands as the definitive event that must redirect all theological reflection. For many of these theologians, Jewish and Christian, the Shoah (Holocaust) is the historical moment that must condition our understanding of all other events, including the Exodus and Resurrection.

But in these circles are also some assumptions about the nature of revelation and about the task of theological reflection that evangelicals find impossible to accept.

One of these is evident in the rule of thumb attributed to the Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz: Stay away from a theology that could be the same before and after Auschwitz. For Metz, as for most theologians of this stripe, the Holocaust has revelatory status. A. Roy Eckardt, for example, laments the fact that the Shoah may never “gain acceptance by Christian theology and the church as ‘revelatory’ and in consequence as religiously revolutionary.”

Eckardt criticizes Carl F. H. Henry, for example, for refusing to adjust his theology in the shadow of Auschwitz: “The Holocaust has done nothing at all to annul the missionary stance toward Jews of Carl F. H. Henry and others.” Henry has built a wall around himself, Eckardt argues, and “once behind the wall he has total immunity to any and all historical events, and all human behavior, and any and all post-New Testament revelation.”

It must be made clear, then, that evangelical rejection of two-covenant theology in such contexts as the Willowbank statement is based on much more than our understanding of Judaism. It is based on our understanding of theology itself and, in turn, on our understanding of the nature of God’s revelation in Scripture.

Most evangelical theologians understand theology as an effort to discover unchanging truth in divinely inspired Scripture. The Bible is the revealed Word of God, and the task of the church is to understand its meaning by working to ascertain what it meant to the original audience. The significance of the text and its application might well differ from age to age, but the essential theological agenda, as embodied in creeds, confessions, and catechisms, is not altered by historical events, however momentous. Such events may cause the church to re-examine its theology but are not revelatory.

But for theologians such as Monica Hellwig, another prominent voice in the Jewish-Christian dialogue, the New Testament’s understanding of everything from Noah to the Second Coming is culturally conditioned by the necessity of the “anti-Judaic polemic.” As she puts it, most scholars “see an historical and logical connection between these suppositions [of supersessionism] and the persecution of Jews. The question then arises as to how Judaism may be ‘legitimated’ as a contemporary faith commitment in terms of a Christian theology.”

She seems to be saying that since the Holocaust, Christians must do something significant to protect the Jews. We best do that by establishing religious equality between Judaism and Christianity. Therefore, Christians must rethink their understanding of the roots of Christianity. That somewhat crude summary may not capture all the nuances of her position, but it does seem to capture many of the arguments behind two-covenant theology.

Two-covenant theology, then, not only calls into question Christian attempts to evangelize Jews; it seems to assume that the entire notion of salvation is misguided, perhaps rooted in the necessity of spiritualizing the kingdom of God. Hence, it is wrong to characterize two-covenant theology as saying that Judaism “saves” Jews and Christianity “saves” Christians. Almost none of the writers on this topic acknowledge the need for anyone to be saved.

One participant in the dialogue, Leon Klenicki, insists that the very word salvation is a problem. “I would use, instead, the word ‘redemption,’” he writes. “My relationship with God is not a relationship by which I will be ‘saved.’ As a partner of God in the covenant, it is my obligation to make every effort in redeeming the world, in making the kingdom of God a reality.…”

A Less Urgent Salvation?

J. I. Packer has recently reminded evangelicals of four tempting propositions about salvation that have relevance for the two-covenant debate. He warns (in his chapter in Evangelical Affirmations) that we must beware of any suggestion that the question of salvation is less urgent, less agonizing, less central, or less substantial than we have thought. We see all these dangers in two-covenant theology.

Most obvious, perhaps, is the claim that salvation is not really an urgent matter, an essentially universalistic claim. Consider Catholic ethicist John Pawlikowski’s assertion: “The changed Christian attitude toward the ongoing authenticity of the Jewish covenant, based on a new understanding of the Christ Event, will of necessity demand rethinking of the meaning of mission in relationship to the people Israel and to other non-Christian faith communities as well” (emphasis mine).

John Kelsay and David Levenson, writing in the Christian Century about a recent Jewish-Presbyterian encounter group in Florida, observed that “Jewish participants pressed the question of Presbyterian perspectives vis-à-vis Islam, Buddhism and the other world religions. From the perspective of rabbinic Judaism, Christian exclusivism seems unnecessary, even when broadened to include Jews through an interpretation of the Abrahamic covenant. The rabbis would contend that God has a covenant with the ‘nations’ that is distinct from Israel’s covenant.”

It is ironic that two-covenant theologians, in their effort to be more sensitive to the religion of the Jewish people, seem to have no category for false religions, which is a most significant issue in the Torah. As the nature of the covenant relationship was being defined at Sinai, there was much concern about false gods and idolatry and covenant faithfulness.

Imagine an Israelite at the foot of Sinai, waiting for Moses to come down the mountain, not yet aware of the Law, but thankful that the covenant God made with Abraham brought deliverance from captivity. Imagine that upon hearing the reading of the law, he protests, “Moses is attempting to supersede the promises made to the patriarchs with legalism and ritual. We must reject this sacrilegious innovation! Moses was a fine fellow for getting us out of Egypt, but all of these sacrifices and rules are an offense to Abrahamites.”

Imagine further that many of the Israelites feel this way, regarding the Mosaic followers as a pesky sect that arrogantly claims to be the true Israel of God. Imagine that they form a committee to establish a discussion group, based on the premise that there are now two covenants represented within the people of God, brothers and sisters with different vocations but a common task in the wilderness.

What should Moses do?

Christians believe that the progress of redemptive history always required that the people of God follow God’s lead. The giving of the Law was a new phase in redemptive history, as was the establishment of the Davidic throne and the preaching of the prophets. At each point, faithful participation in the covenant community required accepting something new, while retaining all that had gone before.

The idea that a new phase of covenantal life would fulfill earlier phases was not a stratagem of disillusioned Christians. It was the prophesied promise of a new covenant, in which the Law would be fulfilled even as it was written on their hearts. Christians believe that that new phase came in the person and work of Jesus Christ. We believe that we are faced with a duty like that of Moses in our imaginary scenario. A new day in redemptive history dawned with the Resurrection, just as it did on Sinai. To reject it is to be cut off from the community of the prophesied new covenant. There is no other name by which we are saved.

It is not the Willowbank Declaration, but the development of two-covenant theology, then, that drafts a blueprint for spiritual genocide. To withhold the gospel from any people is to ensure their spiritual death. There is no distinction, since all have sinned. The circumcised and uncircumcised will be justified only by faith. There is neither Jew nor Greek; if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

Trusted, godly friends advised me to put my wife in an institution for the sake of my ministry.

After his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, college and seminary president Robertson McQuilkin found himself torn between two commitments, two divine callings. At the request of the CT editors, he shares the story of his struggle:

It has been a decade since that day in Florida when Muriel, my wife, repeated to the couple vacationing with us the story she had told just five minutes earlier. Funny, I thought, that’s never happened before. But it began to happen occasionally.

Three years later, when Muriel was hospitalized for tests on her heart, a young doctor called me aside. “You may need to think about the possibility of Alzheimer’s,” he said. I was incredulous. These young doctors are so presumptuous—and insensitive. Muriel was doing the same things she had always done, for the most part. True, we had stopped entertaining in our home—no small loss for the president of a thriving seminary and Bible college. She was a great cook and hostess, but she was having increasing difficulty planning menus. Family meals she could handle, but with guests we could not risk missing a salad and dessert, for example.

And, yes, she was having uncommon difficulty painting a portrait of me, which the college and seminary board—impressed by her earlier splendid portrait of my predecessor—had requested. But Alzheimer’s? While I had barely heard of the disease, a dread began to lurk around the fringes of my consciousness.

When her memory deteriorated further, we went to Joe Tabor, a neurologist friend, who gave her the full battery of tests and, by elimination, confirmed that she had Alzheimer’s. But because she had none of the typical physical deterioration, there was some question. We went to the Duke University Medical Center, believing we should get the best available second opinion. My heart sank as the doctor asked her to name the Gospels and she looked pleadingly at me for help. But she quickly bounced back and laughed at herself. She was a little nervous, perhaps, but nothing was going to get her down.

This time we accepted the verdict. And we determined from the outset not to chase around the country every new “miracle” treatment we might hear about. Little did I know the day was coming when we would be urged—on average, once a week—to pursue every variety of treatment: vitamins, exorcism, chemicals, this guru, that healer. How could I even look into them all, let alone pursue them? I was grateful to friends who made suggestions, because each was an expression of love. But for us, we would trust the Lord to work a miracle in Muriel if he so desired, or work a miracle in me if he did not.

One day the WMHK station manager, the program manager, and the producer of my wife’s morning radio program, “Looking Up,” asked for an appointment. I knew an occasional program she had produced was not used, but the response to her monologue of upbeat encouragement continued to be strong. Though the program was designed for women, businessmen often told me how they arranged their morning affairs so they could catch the program.

As the appointment began, the three executives seemed uneasy. After a few false starts, I caught on. They were reluctantly letting me know that an era was ending. Only months before they had talked of national syndication. I tried to help them out. “Are you meeting with me to tell us that Muriel cannot continue?” They seemed relieved that their painful message was out and none of them had to say it. So, I thought, her public ministry is over. No more conferences, TV, radio. I should have guessed the time had come.

She did not think so, however. She may have lost the radio program, but she insisted on accepting invitations to speak, even though invariably she would come home crushed and bewildered that her train of thought was lost and things did not go well. Gradually, reluctantly, she gave up public ministry.

Still, she could counsel the many young people who sought her out, she could drive and shop, or write her children. The letters did not always make sense, but then, the children would say, “Mom always was a bit spacy.” She also volunteered to read textbooks for a blind graduate student. The plan was to put them on tape so that others could use them. I was puzzled that those responsible never used them, until it dawned on me that reading and writing were going the way of art and public speaking. She was disappointed with each failure and frustration, but only momentarily. She would bounce back with laughter and have another go at it.

Muriel never knew what was happening to her, though occasionally when there was a reference to Alzheimer’s on TV she would muse aloud, “I wonder if I’ll ever have that?” It did not seem painful for her, but it was a slow dying for me to watch the vibrant, creative, articulate person I knew and loved gradually dimming out.

I approached the college board of trustees with the need to begin the search for my successor. I told them that when the day came that Muriel needed me full-time, she would have me. I hoped that would not be necessary till I reached retirement, but at 57 it seemed unlikely I could hold on till 65. They should begin to make plans. But they intended for me to stay on forever, I guess, and made no move. That’s not realistic, and probably not very responsible, I thought, though I appreciated the affirmation.

So began years of struggle with the question of what should be sacrificed: ministry or caring for Muriel. Should I put the kingdom of God first, “hate” my wife and, for the sake of Christ and the kingdom, arrange for institutionalization? Trusted, lifelong friends—wise and godly—urged me to do this.

“Muriel would become accustomed to the new environment quickly.” Would she? Would anyone love her at all, let alone love her as I do? I had often seen the empty, listless faces of those lined up in wheelchairs along the corridors of such places, waiting, waiting for the fleeting visit of some loved one. In such an environment, Muriel would be tamed only with drugs or bodily restraints, of that I was confident.

People who do not know me well have said, “Well, you always said, ‘God first, family second, ministry third.’” But I never said that. To put God first means that all other responsibilities he gives are first, too. Sorting out responsibilities that seem to conflict, however, is tricky business.

In 1988 we planned our first family reunion since the six children had left home, a week in a mountain retreat. Muriel delighted in her children and grandchildren, and they in her. Banqueting with all those gourmet cooks, making a quilt that pictured our life, scene by scene, playing games, singing, picking wild mountain blueberries was marvelous. We planned it as the celebration of our “fortieth” anniversary, although actually it was the thirty-ninth. We feared that by the fortieth she would no longer know us.

But she still knows us—three years later. She cannot comprehend much, nor express many thoughts, and those not for sure. But she knows whom she loves, and lives in happy oblivion to almost everything else.

She is such a delight to me. I don’t have to care for her, I get to. One blessing is the way she is teaching me so much—about love, for example, God’s love. She picks flowers outside—anyone’s—and fills the house with them.

Lately she has begun to pick them inside, too. Someone had given us a beautiful Easter lily, two stems with four or five lilies on each, and more to come. One day I came into the kitchen and there on the window sill over the sink was a vase with a stem of lilies in it. I’ve learned to “go with the flow” and not correct irrational behavior. She means no harm and does not understand what should be done, nor would she remember a rebuke. Nevertheless, I did the irrational—I told her how disappointed I was, how the lilies would soon die, the buds would never bloom, and please do not break off the other stem.

The next day our youngest son, soon to leave for India, came from Houston for his next-to-last visit. I told Kent of my rebuke of his mother and how bad I felt about it. As we sat on the porch swing, savoring each moment together, his mother came to the door with a gift of love for me: she carefully laid the other stem of lilies on the table with a gentle smile and turned back into the house. I said simply, “Thank you.” Kent said, “You’re doing better, Dad!”

Muriel cannot speak in sentences now, only in phrases and words, and often words that make little sense: “no” when she means “yes,” for example. But she can say one sentence, and she says it often: “I love you.”

She not only says it, she acts it. The board arranged for a companion to stay in our home so I could go daily to the office. During those two years it became increasingly difficult to keep Muriel home. As soon as I left, she would take out after me. With me, she was content; without me, she was distressed, sometimes terror stricken. The walk to school is a mile round trip. She would make that trip as many as ten times a day. Sometimes at night, when I helped her undress, I found bloody feet. When I told our family doctor, he choked up. “Such love,” he said simply. Then, after a moment, “I have a theory that the characteristics developed across the years come out at times like these.” I wish I loved God like that—desperate to be near him at all times. Thus she teaches me, day by day.

Friends and family often ask, “How are you doing?” meaning, I would take it, “How do you feel?” I am at a loss to respond. There is that subterranean grief that will not go away. I feel just as alone as if I had never known her as she was, I suppose, but the loneliness of the night hours comes because I did know her. Do I grieve for her loss or mine? Further, there is the sorrow that comes from my increasing difficulty in meeting her needs.

But I guess my friends are asking not about her needs, but about mine. Or perhaps they wonder, in the contemporary jargon, how I am “coping,” as they reflect on how the reputed indispensable characteristics of a good marriage have slipped away, one by one.

I came across the common contemporary wisdom in this morning’s newspaper in a letter to a national columnist: “I ended the relationship because it wan’t meeting my needs,” the writer explained. The counselor’s response was predictable: “What were your needs that didn’t get met by him in the relationship? Do you still have these same needs? What would he have to do to fill these needs? Could he do it?” Needs for communication, understanding, affirmation, common interests, sexual fulfillment—the list goes on. If the needs are not met, split. He offered no alternatives.

I once reflected on the eerie irrelevance of every one of those criteria for me. But I am not wired for introspection; I am more oriented outward and toward action and the future. I even feel an occasional surge of exhilaration as I find my present assignment more challenging than running an institution’s complex ministry. Certainly greater creativity and flexibility are needed.

I have long lists of “coping strategies,” which have to be changed weekly, sometimes daily. Grocery shopping together may have been recreation, but it is not so much fun when Muriel begins to load other people’s carts and take off with them, disappearing into the labyrinth of supermarket aisles. Or how do you get a person to eat or take a bath when she steadfastly refuses? It is not like meeting a $10 million budget or designing a program to grasp some emerging global opportunity, to be sure. And it is not as public or exhilarating. But it demands greater resources than I could have imagined, and thus highlights more clearly than ever my own inadequacies, as well as provides constant opportunity to draw on our Lord’s vast reservoir of resources.

As she needed more and more of me, I wrestled daily with the question of who gets me full-time—Muriel or Columbia Bible College and Seminary? Dr. Tabor advised me not to make any decision based on my desire to see Muriel stay contented. “Make your plans apart from that question. Whether or not you can be successful in your dreams for the college and seminary or not, I cannot judge, but I can tell you now, you will not be successful with Muriel.”

When the time came, the decision was firm. It took no great calculation. It was a matter of integrity. Had I not promised, 42 years before, “in sickness and in health … till death do us part”?

This was no grim duty to which I stoically resigned, however. It was only fair. She had, after all, cared for me for almost four decades with marvelous devotion; now it was my turn. And such a partner she was! If I took care of her for 40 years, I would never be out of her debt.

But how could I walk away from the responsibility of a ministry God had blessed so signally during our 22 years at Columbia Bible College and Seminary?

Not easily. True, many dreams had been fulfilled. But so many dreams were yet on the drawing board. And the peerless team God had brought together—a team not just of professionals, but of dear friends—how could I bear to leave them? Resignation was painful; but the right path was not difficult to discern. Whatever Columbia needed, it did not need a part-time, distracted leader. It is better to move out and let God designate a leader to step in while the momentum is continuing.

No, it was not a choice between two loves. Sometimes that kind of choice becomes necessary, but this time responsibilities did not conflict. I suppose responsibilities in the will of God never conflict (though my evaluation of those responsibilities is fallible). Am I making the right choice at the right time in the right way? I hope so. This time it seemed clearly in the best interest of the ministry for me to step down, even if board and administrators thought otherwise. Both loves—for Muriel and for Columbia Bible College and Seminary—dictated the same choice. There was no conflict of loves, then, or of obligations.

I have been startled by the response to the announcement of my resignation. Husbands and wives renew marriage vows, pastors tell the story to their congregations. It was a mystery to me, until a distinguished oncologist, who lives constantly with dying people, told me, “Almost all women stand by their men; very few men stand by their women.” Perhaps people sensed this contemporary tragedy and somehow were helped by a simple choice I considered the only option.

It is all more than keeping promises and being fair, however. As I watch her brave descent into oblivion, Muriel is the joy of my life. Daily I discern new manifestations of the kind of person she is, the wife I always loved. I also see fresh manifestations of God’s love—the God I long to love more fully.

Grieved for me? the God of strength and power

Griev’d for a worm, which when I tread,

I passe away and leave it dead?

—George Herbert, “Ephesians 4:30”

Groan is one of those words, like whisper, clunk, and vroom, that sounds like what it means. (Onomatopoeia, which sounds like a skin disease, is the technical term for this quirk of language.) When you say groan aloud, it resonates deep in the belly, not just the throat. As you speak, the vowels tend to drag out, a sympathetic echo of the long discomfort that normally provokes a groan.

It was during a trip to South America that I first noticed the word groan in the Bible. I was visiting prisons in Peru and Chile on a magazine assignment, and I had already heard much groaning from the inmates. One evening, while reading from the Psalms alone in my hotel room, I came across Psalm 102, a poem most likely written by a prisoner or a refugee from war. Its author eloquently expresses his desperate state:

… my bones burn like glowing embers.

My heart is blighted and withered like grass;

I forget to eat my food.

Because of my loud groaning

I am reduced to skin and bones.

I am like a desert owl,

like an owl among the ruins.

I lie awake; I have become

like a bird alone on a roof.

All day long my enemies taunt me;

those who rail against me use my name as a curse.

For I eat ashes as my food

and mingle my drink with tears …

(vv. 3–9; all Scripture references from NIV)

That psalm captured precisely the spirit of the prisoners I had been interviewing. Not all were suffering such physical hardships, but to a man they all groused about the food, the loneliness, the insomnia, the rejection. Like desert owls, they lived apart from civilization, among the ruins. All had hearts “blighted and withered like grass.”

The psalmist proceeds to contrast his own tenuous existence with that of God: “But you, O Lord, sit enthroned forever; your renown endures through all generations” (v. 12). The heavens and earth will wear out like a garment, to be discarded like outworn clothes, but “you remain the same, and your years will never end” (v. 27).

Sandwiched between these contrary descriptions of a miserable prisoner and a majestic God there appears a request—the heart of the psalm. The author asks that in the future, when descendants reflect on former times, they may be able to say the following:

The Lord looked down from his sanctuary on high,

from heaven he viewed the earth,

to hear the groans of the prisoners

and release those condemned to death.

(vv. 19–20)

Later, when I had access to a concordance, I looked up other appearances of the word groan or groaning in the Bible. I found that the image presented in Psalm 102—that of a faraway, exalted God bending down to hear the pain of the oppressed—typifies the use of the word in the Old Testament. When the Israelites groaned in their slavery (Exod. 2:23), God reached down to deliver them. When they groaned under foreign oppressors (Judg. 2:18), God raised up judges to lead them.

Hebrew writers never ceased to marvel that a transcendent God, high and lifted up, would care enough to intervene on their behalf. What right have mere mortals to expect such personal attention from the Lord of the Universe? As one psalmist expressed it, “What is man, that you are mindful of him …?” (Ps. 8:4).

Readers of the Old Testament can thus draw great comfort from the astonishing truth that God himself listens to our groans, and can be roused to act on our behalf.

But the Bible is far too realistic a book to close the story there. What about the many times God does not intervene: the times when prisoners, or widows, or war refugees, or the poor and sick, groan loud and long and get no sign that anyone is listening?

True, God heard the groans of the Israelites in Egypt, but several centuries slogged by before he sent Moses to lead them out of slavery. “Hey, you up there—are you deaf? Can’t you hear my groans?” That’s more the attitude expressed by Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job, and some of the other psalmists. “My groans pour out like water,” Job protested (Job 3:24). “I am worn out from groaning,” complained one psalmist (6:6). Another turned his groan into a desperate query:

I remembered you, O God, and I groaned.…

Will the Lord reject forever?

Will he never show his favor again?…

Has God forgotten to be merciful? (77:3, 7)

That final question haunted the Jews for four centuries after Malachi and the last few prophets had faded from the scene. They saw no miracles, no spectacular interventions, and heard no new words from the Lord. Perhaps he had forgotten how to be merciful. Perhaps he had plugged his ears against their groans.

Jesus, however, put an abrupt and decisive end to such speculation. Not only had God not “plugged his ears,” he suddenly took on ears—literal, ear-drum-ossicle-cochlea, human ears. On the cracked and dusty plains of Palestine he heard firsthand the molecular vibrations of human groans: from Jews oppressed by Roman conquerors (and from a Roman officer, too, grieving over his son’s death), and from quarantined leprosy victims, and from prostitutes, tax collectors, and others who groaned more from guilt than from pain.

Finally, Jesus himself groaned. Listen to the words he cried out on the cross, in their original context (Ps. 22:1–2):

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

so far from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

by night, and am not silent.

According to the author of Hebrews, “During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death” (5:7). But Jesus’ loud cries and tears did not save him from death. He saw his mission through unto the end, and that end meant execution.

Why did Jesus have to suffer and die? The question deserves an entire book, and has prompted many books, but among the answers the Bible gives is this most mysterious answer: Suffering served as a kind of “learning experience” for God. Such words seem faintly heretical, but I am merely following Hebrews: “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered” (5:8). Elsewhere, that book tells us that the author of our salvation was made perfect through suffering (2:10).

These words, full of fathomless mystery, surely mean at least this: The Incarnation had meaning for God as well as for us. On one level, of course, God understood physical pain, for he designed the marvelous nervous system that carries it to our brains as a warning against harm. But had he, a Spirit, ever felt physical pain? Not until the Incarnation, the wrinkle in time when God himself experienced what it is like to be a human being. In 33 years on earth he learned about poverty, and about family squabbles, and social rejection, and verbal abuse, and betrayal. And he learned about pain. What it feels like to have an accuser leave the red imprint of his fingers on your face. What it feels like to have a whip studded with metal lash across your back. And what it feels like to have a crude iron spike pounded through muscle, tendon, and skin. On earth, God learned all that.

In some incomprehensible way, because of Jesus, God hears our groans differently. The author of Hebrews marveled that whatever we are going through, God has himself gone through. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin” (4:15). We have a high priest who, having graduated from the school of suffering, “is able to deal gently with those who are ignorant and are going astray, since he himself is subject to weakness” (5:2). Because of Jesus, God understands, truly understands, our groans.

We need no longer cry into the abyss, “Hey, are you listening?” By joining us on earth, God gave visible, historical proof that he hears our groans, and even groans them with us.

My survey of biblical groans led finally to Romans 8, where the word plays a central role in one of the great summary chapters of the New Testament. Paul’s language soars as he contemplates the wonderful new life in the Spirit that contrasts sharply with the life of dreariness described in the previous chapter.

Romans 8 sums up the entire human condition—more, that of the entire planet. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time,” Paul says in verse 22. And we humans “groan inwardly” as we await the redemption of our bodies (v. 23). As Paul sees it, since Adam’s fall the planet and all its inhabitants have been emitting a constant stream of low-frequency distress signals.

Paul loved a good play on words, and the first two appearances of the word groan set up his climactic conclusion: “… the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (v. 26).

Because I sometimes write about pain and disappointment, I get letters from people who pour out their private groans. I know well the helpless feeling of not knowing what I ought to pray, and I suspect every pastor, counselor, missionary, or other Christian minister does too. How to pray for a person in a dead-end marriage that seems to represent only stuntedness, not growth? Or for a victim of child abuse who as an adult finds it impossible to enjoy sex? Or for a parent of a child diagnosed with terminal cancer? Or for a Christian in Nepal imprisoned for her faith? What can we ask for? How can we pray?

Romans 8 announces the good news that we need not always figure out exactly how to pray. We ought, of course, to think about what to pray for. But when we cannot, we need not despair. We need only groan.

As I read Paul’s words, an image comes to mind of a mother tuning in to her child’s wordless cry. I know mothers who, through years of experience, have learned to distinguish a cry for food from a cry for attention, an earache cry from a stomachache cry. To me, the sounds are identical; but the mother instinctively discerns the meaning of the child’s nonverbal groan. It is the inarticulateness, the very helplessness, of the child that gives the mother such compassionate intensity.

The Spirit of God has resources of sensitivity beyond even the wisest mother. Linking the groans of Romans 8, Paul tells of a Spirit who lives inside us, who detects needs we cannot articulate and expresses them in a language we cannot comprehend. When we do not know what to pray, he fills in the blanks. Evidently, it is our very helplessness that God, too, delights in. Our weakness gives opportunity for his strength.

The remainder of Romans 8 shows what this truth meant to the apostle Paul. After declaring that God is not deaf to our groans, that God in fact can hear groans faster than we can voice them, Paul launches into a stirring hymn of faith. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” he asks (v. 31). A God of such compassion, who did not spare his own Son, will not let our groans go unheard. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 38–39).

After surveying all the biblical uses of the word groan, I realized that the odd, onomatopoeic word expresses a profound insight into God’s response to human pain. The Bible presents, if you will, a “trinity of groans,” a progression of intimacy in God’s involvement with his creation. The Old Testament tells us of a God above, a Father who, though transcendent, is no unfeeling “Ground of all Being,” but a Person who attends to our dwarfish human needs. The Gospels tell of a further step, the God with us, who became one of us—a God who took on ears. And the Epistles tell of the God within us, an invisible Spirit who gives expression to our wordless pain. Romans 8 concludes with the bold hint that one day there will be no need for groans at all. Our groans will be transformed into expressions of eternal joy and praise.

Will Sunday school survive the “me generation”?

It is as much a part of the landscape as the church notice boards on which it is advertised: Sunday School at 9:30, Worship at 11:00. We grew up in it. We have been naughty in it. We have been bored in it. Its texture is strong in our deep memories.

Yet the bedrock institution of Sunday school is in trouble. Attendance nationally is flat or declining. Practically everyone involved, from curriculum publishers to ordinary Sunday-morning teachers, expresses frustration with its present and uncertainty about its future. Few expect Sunday school to disappear—one might as well expect hymnals to disappear from the pews—but nearly everyone says it has problems with no solution in sight. And this in a time when many believe that, more than ever, people need what Sunday school promises.

“There has never been a greater need for effective children’s Sunday school, with all the negative forces affecting the development of kids,” says Wes Haystead, a Christian-education consultant. “But the church has never been less willing or less well-equipped to fill that need.”

The need extends beyond children. Search Institute of Minneapolis recently published a Lilly Endowment-sponsored study of youth and adults in mainline denominations, concluding, “Of all the areas of congregational life we examined, involvement in an effective Christian education program has the strongest tie to a person’s growth in faith.” They also found that only three out of ten youth or adults in the mainline churches regularly attended Christian-education classes.

Epochal change should not go unmarked, or unconsidered. Why is something that has worked so well for so long suddenly in trouble? What does the decline of Sunday school tell us about ourselves? Are we content to let it happen?

Literacy For The Poor

To understand what is at stake in the Christian-education crisis, we need a historical perspective. How did the institution develop? How have the form and function of Sunday schools changed over the years?

The first American Sunday schools were started in the 1790s, modeled on British experiments. They aimed at offering the illiterate, urban poor a basic education—reading and writing—with the Bible as textbook. Sponsored by philanthropic laypersons, these first Sunday schools usually had no institutional tie to the established church. Sometimes they met in a church building, but just as often they used a rented hall. Their teachers were usually paid professionals, and Sunday schools occasionally drew on government funds. They were, after all, fulfilling a secular purpose—education.

But in the first decades of the nineteenth century, according to historian Anne Boylan, the author of Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution 1790–1880, Sunday schools changed dramatically. Their purpose became evangelistic—to prepare students for conversion. Bible knowledge became the basic aim, often pursued through contests of verse memorization.

The new evangelical Sunday schools spread like wildfire, as part of a vast outpouring of evangelical philanthropy in the early nineteenth century. Teachers—now volunteers—were typically in their late teens and early twenties, often recently converted in the Second Great Awakening and the revivals that followed. They gave tremendous energy to their cause.

While the ABCs continued to be taught, the spread of free public schools made this less critical. Public schools chose to exclude Christian doctrine from their curriculum, opting for broader principles of civic morality and the providence of God. Sunday schools, Boylan suggests, thrived partly because they formed a symbiotic relationship with the public schools. Most Americans wanted their children to learn more than the watered-down civil religion of public schooling. Sunday schools made up the deficit.

As the Sunday-school curriculum changed, so did its institutional links to the church. Middle-class church members began sending their children. At first this was an act of piety—even the pastor condescending to send his children in with the ghetto kids—but it soon became normal as churches embraced the schools. The movement had begun interdenominationally, but as churches took over, denominational structures did, too.

For a long time Sunday schools maintained a strong missionary component. “During the 1860s and 1870s,” writes Boylan, “almost every large city in the country had … a large, service-oriented Sunday school, located in a poor neighborhood and often operated in connection with a city mission.” In addition, Sunday schools in the settled East took up offerings to extend Sunday schools in the West, where roaming missionaries established them as a first step toward building a church. In any locale, the Sunday school’s reason for being was to prepare children (and some adults) for conversion.

After the Civil War, however, Sunday schools shifted their thinking. The new curriculums assumed, according to Boylan, “that students would remain in school for many years, that they should grow gradually in religious knowledge, and that conversion would be a minor aspect of the overall experience. (Individual schools and teachers could, of course, place greater stress on conversion if they wished.)” Revivals had declined, and a more optimistic, less crisis-oriented view of children’s development had spread. But the shift also came because Sunday school had changed from a mission strategy to a church-nurturing strategy. The heathen were no longer its chief targets, but the children of the blessed.

Distinctives Of The Movement

By the late nineteenth century, Sunday school had settled into something quite recognizable today. As Christian-education specialist Jack Clark puts it, “Sunday school is one of the most stable institutions that there is. People know what Sunday school is. It has an identity. That’s one reason it’s so hard to change.”

When so many innovations last only a generation, why did Sunday school endure? Why did every Protestant church embrace it?

Observers point to two characteristics: like nothing else in the church, Sunday school is lay led and is done in small groups. Lay-led small groups allow personal relationships to dominate. Sunday school became not only a place for nurturing believers, but also a primary doorway into the church. Outsiders, both children and adults, could find themselves in a small, friendly group taught by someone not terribly different from themselves.

In some places, this is still a successful formula for Sunday school. “Sunday morning still is the base,” says Harry Piland, director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Sunday-school division. “We don’t cash in our base.”

Though Southern Baptists acknowledge the same problems that cause other churches to despair, and admit that Sunday morning classes no longer draw in unchurched people, their Sunday schools are growing—adding 600,000 participants nationally over the past decade. The reason is commitment, says Piland. “Southern Baptists are committed absolutely, not just partially, to Sunday school. The strength of our church lies in the mobilization of lay people.… In a sense, for the Southern Baptist Convention the Sunday school simply is the church. It is the organizational structure of the church doing its work.”

Such commitment is hard to manufacture, however. Most churches today lack such a vision.

A Core Problem

The problem with Sunday school starts at its very core: volunteers. Sunday school requires more lay leadership than any other program of the church—dozens, sometimes hundreds, of teachers, who must be highly reliable week after week. Says Marlene LeFever of David C. Cook Publishing Co., a leading curriculum publisher, “If you ask any director of Christian education, ‘What’s your number-one problem?’ it’s volunteers.”

Wes Willis of Scripture Press echoes her: “Teacher recruitment is the single most common question I encounter. I was at a conference recently where one director of Christian education said, ‘I’m recruiting my teachers to teach for just one quarter—they won’t commit to any longer than that.’ Someone else said, ‘I’m recruiting on a monthly basis.’ Then someone said, ‘I’m signing up teachers one week at a time.’”

The problem goes deeper than simple availability, claims Bill Barber, minister of Christian education for a huge Sunday school at Central Church in Memphis, Tennessee. “This is a ‘me’ generation. People just don’t understand commitment. I had a meeting recently for prospective Sunday-school teachers, and I asked them, ‘What are your fears?’ One lady said, ‘I’m afraid of making a commitment because something else might come along that I want to do.’”

Finding teachers was never easy; Boylan’s historical study reports that nineteenth-century “complaints about ‘instability and decay’ in teaching staffs were frequent, as were remarks about being ‘very much in want of good and permanent teachers.’” Nevertheless, “Sunday school succeeded for 200 years on the energy and ability of a massive corps of housewives,” Wes Haystead says. Now housewives are in short supply.

“For the single parent out in the workplace, to give up that block of time is difficult,” says Billie Baptiste, publisher of Gospel Light’s Sunday-school curriculum. “If you have a divorced family, the child is often with a different set of parents on alternate weekends, so there is sporadic attendance. The parents are more prone to feel they are entitled to vacations, to time away.”

Failing to find enough teachers who will make a year-long commitment, many churches are rotating teachers in and out. Such changes make Sunday school less satisfying for both students and teachers, because personal relationships do not have a chance to grow. “Nobody ever gets a sense of ministry out of it,” says Haystead. “That kind of structure has killed a lot of interest.”

For Lack Of Vision

The problem of volunteers is matched by a subtler difficulty: a lack of pastoral concern. “For some time it hasn’t been fashionable to be a Sunday-school enthusiast,” Haystead says. He remembers attending the Congress on the Bible, a major conference of evangelicals. “In the whole program there was no mention of Sunday school, which is the largest forum for teaching the Bible in the world.” He wrote a letter to the organizers, who apologized for their oversight. But, says Haystead, their forgetfulness is a “symptom of the fact that those leaders aren’t involved in Sunday school in their own locale.”

Sunday-school leaders often feel they are presiding over the decline of one of the church’s most crucial institutions—yet they cannot easily get the attention of the church’s leaders, who are far more concerned with the visible, clergy-led Sunday-morning worship service than with the diffuse, lay-led Sunday school.

I asked numerous Sunday-school activists if they knew of any emerging models of Sunday school—some new approach that deserves examination. They all said no. “I see a lot of tinkering,” Haystead said, “mostly out of desperation. Staff workers come to conferences with a look of desperation in their eyes, saying, Does anybody have any answers?”

Some churches, concluding that times have changed irreversibly, are eliminating adult Sunday school entirely. Instead, they run children’s programs concurrently with worship services and substitute home Bible studies or other midweek small groups for their adult Christian education program. It can work, as Bill Hybels’s gigantic Willow Creek Church outside Chicago has proven by mobilizing hundreds of midweek Bible-study groups.

But programming during the week can lose as well as gain. According to Memphis’s Bill Barber, “Lots of churches are into small groups every which night of the week. Most go for a while and then buzz out. They’re up and down.”

The Changing Mind Of The Church

It is not every day that an institution that has been stable for a century plunges into oblivion. The decline of Sunday school is not a seasonal change in fashion. It represents a shifting of tectonic plates, a shaking of the foundations. What does it say about the changing mind of the church and the world?

We cannot blame the dangerous decline of Sunday school solely on a shortage of housewives. The societal shift to two-income families is significant in our generation, but it cannot be terribly important over a century. Women in the nineteenth century worked—worked longer, harder hours than we do. Yes, their schedules were flexible, but in the face of tremendous demands they made the choice to flex them toward Sunday school. Would we?

Nor can it be argued that Sunday school is outdated because of computers or video or new educational techniques. Sunday school is a broad way of putting people together on Sunday morning: It has changed a great deal, and it can again. It is flexible enough to deal with a changing world.

The best explanation for the decline of Sunday school may start with an unpleasant suggestion: We don’t care enough about children.

Sunday school’s mission, while extending to adults, has always been powered by a concern for children. By objective measures, children today are neglected in America. Of all age groups, children are most likely to live in poverty. They suffer from shattered families as perhaps never before in history, and few couples, whether rich or poor, are willing to stay together “for the sake of the children.” Surely the entitlement of abortion says something about how children are valued. So does the decrease in stay-at-home mothers—perhaps the most immediate short-term cause of Sunday school’s decline.

Of course, there is talk about children today. There are endless publications and seminars about family life. But these are mainly reactive. The interest is based less on enthusiasm for children than on fear of the demise of the family.

In the church, the fear seems strong. The breakup of the traditional family, the spread of drugs and premarital sex, are greatly voiced concerns. “The baby-boomer parents are concerned about their children,” Gospel Light’s Billie Baptiste says. “What they want is quality. They demand quality. Because of the crisis with families, there’s a fear level with parents. They want their families to be strong. They are looking for values.”

But if they seek “quality,” Sunday school is the last place they are going to find it. Sunday school’s lay leadership practically ensures that, however friendly and personable it may be, its quality control will be weak. This probably explains, as much as anything, why Sunday school has not been able to draw strength from fear over the demise of the family. Few people see that Sunday school is medicine for the disease the family has got. Sunday school, in fact, does not seem like medicine at all. It is not a six-week seminar you can pop in the VCR. You cannot take it in a dose. It is more like a way of life. And it is a way of life at odds with the pursuit of quality.

Today, quality-seeking American Christians are probably less centered in a local congregation than they ever have been. They will drive considerable distances to church, choosing their congregation on the basis of strong preaching and professionally led programs. To attract such members, churches must add professional staff. Today, most medium-sized churches have a professionally led youth group. Large churches are likely to have a professionally organized nursery. They are competing for members with the megachurch down the freeway. Even more, they are competing with the many “quality” entertainments of a Sunday morning.

The modern American Christian has little denominational loyalty and only slightly more congregational loyalty. He or she is loyal to “quality.” The loyalty of a consumer—consumers do have strong loyalties, to brands and chains and mail-order catalogs—is a different kind of loyalty from that of a family member.

No wonder Sunday school is in trouble. It grew up as a cause, as a way of bringing the gospel to children. It became inescapably part of small-town America, an extension of the family and the community: all of us gathering to teach each other, and each other’s children. Family and community may not fit with competing “quality.” But does “quality” substitute for whatever we are losing?

If only my draft board could see me now.

Here I am on a Thai Airways flight from Bangkok to Hanoi: 30 years after France gave up on Vietnam, 20 years after we decided to bomb Hanoi, 15 years after our final withdrawal from Saigon. I am traveling with a former marine captain, Bob Seiple, who flew 300 combat missions over Vietnam. As president of World Vision, a Christian relief-and-development agency, he now spends much of his time figuring out ways to finagle humanitarian aid (medical supplies, resins for artificial limbs, and visas for G.I.-fathered orphans) into a country our government doesn’t officially recognize.

A warrior turned peacemaker, Bob Seiple is still sorting out his feelings about Vietnam. So am I.

So, apparently, are the American people. University classes on the war are filled to capacity. Moviegoers flock to see what our nation’s pop psychologists, Hollywood filmmakers, have to say. My local Crown Books store has 104 history titles on display, 32 of which are on Vietnam. America is still searching for a resolution to a war that won’t go away.

What kind of bandages can bind the psychological wounds left from 58,000 dead Americans, 600,000 dead South Vietnamese, and over 1,000,000 dead North Vietnamese?

Hanoi: A Familiar Flight

For Bob Seiple, this flight into Hanoi over war-worn northern Vietnam is a familiar one. Most of his bombing missions were here. “I was a soldier doing my duty,” he says, “so it’s not a question of guilt. But I feel a great sadness for the people of this country who have suffered, and still suffer, so much.”

My feelings aren’t of guilt either. I don’t ever remember feeling guilty about missing a war my friends so faithfully fought. But I do remember feeling confused. And I still do. I read Dispatches, a heart-tearing, in-the-trenches Vietnam War journal by Michael Herr, and decide all war is wrong. I read Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam and am convinced our government mishandled the war. I read Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History and come away amazed that anyone has ever been able to get along with the stubborn Vietnamese leadership. And when I read about Vietnam’s post-1975 wars with Cambodia and China in Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy, I agonize with the Vietnamese people who have been fighting unrelenting war for 40 years.

As we descend into Hanoi’s airport for my first steps on Vietnamese soil, I realize that this ambiguity and confusion carry over to my feelings about how we should respond to Vietnam’s political and economic needs today.

The 40-minute drive from the airport provides my first glimpse of these needs. Sixty-seven million people live in a country roughly the size of California, and at any one time it seems as if sixty-five million of them are whizzing by our van on bicycles.

Most Vietnamese are poor farmers. Seventy percent of the people live in rural areas minding water buffalo, growing rice and other crops. The average Vietnamese can expect to make $150 per year.

But in the environs of Hanoi, small cafés, tire shops, drugstores, and woodworking factories line the roads. It is an unseemly display of private enterprise in a Marxist country. Entrepreneurs have made the best of remnants of the war: parachutes shield open-air cafés from the sun; pieces of temporary metal runways serve as walls for small homes; army jeeps and supply trucks are now delivery vans and private cars. “Fish ponds,” water-filled bomb craters 50 feet wide, dot the landscape, daily reminders of the B-52 barrage we sent Hanoi’s way in the early 1970s.

Despite the rampant signs of individual enterprise, I can never completely forget that this is a communist country. An official “minder” met our flight at the airport and will be ever-present during our stay. Congenial, friendly, helpful, even wise—but always there.

And whenever we meet with official Vietnam, we are aware that we are walking a tightrope. After all, we were at war with these people. Two of our party served in the United States armed forces. It is likely some of the Vietnamese officials did likewise—on the other side. The U.S. government continues to impose trade sanctions against Vietnam. Hanoi politicians still blast the U.S. in speeches.

On a personal level, this tightrope is fairly easily navigated. In private meetings, official arrogance and bravado is replaced by a genuine warmth for the American people. “We miss you,” one man says. “Please come back soon.”

Far trickier is the religio-political tightrope. Theoretically, the Vietnamese constitution allows freedom of religion. In practice, churches, especially healthy, growing churches, are harassed. Church meetings must be okayed in advance. Public evangelism is forbidden. Building permits for churches are not forthcoming. Pastors may not travel outside their parishes. Sermons are constantly monitored.

Sometimes the harassment escalates to persecution. Before flying to Vietnam, I met with a former Vietnamese pastor now living in Los Angeles. Nguyen Cuong was arrested in 1983, held 50 months before trial, and then in 1987 he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. His crime? “They said I violated the order and security of the state,” says Nguyen. The real reason, many say, is that his church grew from 100 to 1,000.

Vietnam is governed by an antireligious system, make no mistake. As representatives of a Christian agency, my traveling companions have to balance carefully several competing objectives: First, offer the humanitarian aid our government licenses us to give; second, be up-front about our Christian motivations for giving that aid; third, offer aid and witness without arousing the Vietnamese government’s religious paranoia or, worse, compromising Vietnamese pastors.

But all that runs far below the tabletop talk of an official dinner like the one we have with Ministry of Health officials our first night in Hanoi. We discuss ways World Vision can help: support for an acupuncture hospital, medicine for an eye clinic, medical journals for a university faculty. We are on a tightrope, we all know, but even as we fight for balance we smile and do our business.

Our meal ends with Asian abruptness—immediately after the last course is eaten we all rise together and leave. But we feel—or hope—that the conversations are one more small, positive step toward new understandings.

The next morning, on our drive to the airport, we take time to stop at the wreckage of a B-52 shot down in 1972. The tail section of the bomber juts out of a watercress pool, surrounded by simple houses in the heart of Hanoi. A woman in a black-pitch boat tends the watercress. Nearby, children spin toy wooden tops, and black-pajamaed girls wash clothes at a spigot.

As we stand contemplating the rusted wreck, an old man walks up. He saw the plane, a fireball from the sky, fall here on May 22 at 10:20 P.M., 18 years ago. Nobody died at the crash site. Only one house burned. We ask the old man if he harbors any grudges against the pilot—or Americans.

“The war was nonsense,” he says. “People are the victims—Vietnamese and American.”

As we drive to the airport for the next leg of our trip, Bob Seiple muses on the conversation. “If the people could vote on war, there’d never be any,” he says. I cannot help thinking that the people of both Vietnam and the U.S. seem ahead of our governments, if the agenda is reconciliation.

Da Nang: The Moral Economics Of Relief

An FAA official riding on Hàng Không, the national Vietnamese Airlines, would have a heart attack. Often the door closes and taxiing begins (on an airstrip dotted with water buffalo and kids) before everyone is seated. Did I say seated? Sometimes there are more people than seats. What are the aisles for, after all?

But by the standard customer measures of success, Hàng Không works: it is reasonably on time, the pilots are good, and the safety record of the Soviet TU-134s is acceptable. Thus we arrive in Da Nang on schedule and circle Monkey Mountain and Marble Mountain to land on a runway that 20 years ago touched down more United States airplanes than most American commercial airports.

The atmosphere of Da Nang still reflects two decades of G.I.-oriented commerce. Where Hanoi is reserved and cool, Da Nang is open and relaxed. The ancient capital, Hue, is just to the north. This area was the embarkation point of early French traders and missionaries who first exposed the Vietnamese to Western ways.

Humanitarian agencies such as World Vision, World Relief, and the Mennonite Central Committee are the only “missionaries” allowed in Vietnam now. Others were forced to leave after the U.S. involvement ended in 1975. It is left to the World Visions of the world to do what they can. We visit two projects they have initiated: a pig-raising farm and a pharmaceutical factory. Both impress us with their efficiency.

Giving money to Christian humanitarian causes might seem like a surer road to reconciliation than the political minefield of Hanoi-Washington politics. Certainly the economic need is unambiguous. And poverty always leads to a second unambiguous problem: disease. Malaria, diarrhea, tetanus, and fever, all treatable diseases, are the greatest killers of today’s Vietnamese.

The needs are clear and the resources available, yet it’s not quite that simple. Relief-and-development agencies struggle with two problems, one moral, the other practical: how to raise money and how to give it away.

One would think that the problems of raising money would stay back home in the United States. Wrong. We visit a rehabilitation hospital in Da Nang. The minute we enter the old 12-bed ward, every eye turns to a 12-year-old girl, recovering from an appendectomy. Her black-suited mother sits on her bed with a bamboo fan, shooing away flies, heat, and the depression of long, empty hospital hours. Our attention is automatically drawn to this particular bed because the girl is pretty, her disease is photographable, and we are accompanied by a film crew making a fund-raising film.

It doesn’t take too many visits before one becomes expert at identifying the “photogenic illness.” To his credit, Bob Seiple is careful to greet every patient in the ward. But still, choices are made. Some of the illness we see is too plain ugly to play on American television.

It is more than just physically ugly—it is morally ugly. The missing limbs and eyes more often than not were blown away by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Chinese, and American bombs, land mines, grenades, and rifles. And the untreated treatable diseases are a direct reflection of a communist system unable to deliver medical supplies. To tell and show the real story would (1) turn off American viewers; (2) alienate the Vietnamese (and probably the American) government; and (3) ultimately render the agencies ineligible to help at all.

The hard moral choices of raising money lead to a second, more practical problem: how to give it away. There are three basic choices: let the indigenous church do it, build your own staff structures to administer the funds, or work through the Vietnamese government.

Our natural inclination might be the church. But in Vietnam, this would very likely compromise pastors. Money brings power, and the Vietnamese government has no intention of allowing the Christian church any power except that which can be used to support government policy.

The second choice is for relief agencies to build their own delivery systems. But in Vietnam, this is impossible. Visas are simply unavailable. Paul Jones, World Vision’s Vietnam field representative, must live in Bangkok and commute to Hanoi. Under trying circumstances, he is remarkably efficient and effective. He could be more so if he lived in the country and could hire staff.

So, left with the third option of working through the government, agencies do what they can. It means there are far more protocol dinners and meetings with government officials than any sane person could possibly enjoy. It means catering to interdepartmental jealousies within the Vietnamese government.

One commonly told horror story is of an agency that raised a million dollars in Europe for humanitarian relief. After it got changed into Vietnam’s currency at the official exchange rate, after goods were bought within Vietnam by government officials (which means a high surcharge for graft and payola), and after allowances were made for the shoddy quality of goods purchased, the $1 million bought about $20,000 worth of humanitarian relief.

Careful, experienced agencies can do much to avoid such scenarios. But the time—and, yes, let’s be frank—that compromises require is significant.

The economic reconciliation bought by these machinations, of course, is valuable. Indeed, we repeatedly witnessed the power of such projects to bring people together. Perhaps the most dramatic had nothing to do with a Western relief agency.

We visited a stiflingly hot rattan “factory.” In a room no larger than most Americans’ living rooms, 12 Vietnamese took raw materials through six production stations, the final a weaving loom that produced baskets, chairs, and mats. All the workers were blind.

In a smaller, even hotter room upstairs, we asked the two old men who ran the factory how they happened to start it. The first had been a soldier in the South Vietnamese army. He removed his sunglasses and showed us two empty sockets—his eyes had been destroyed by a bomb in 1968. The second man had been a North Vietnamese guerrilla. In that same year he had haunted the South Vietnamese mountains, launching many bombs of the same kind that had destroyed the other man’s eyes. He himself lost his eyes (and a hand) when he stepped on a land mine during a raid.

At a meeting of representatives of 6,000 blind people in Da Nang, these two met—bitter enemies driven into one another’s arms by physical tragedy and economic necessity.

Such enmity cannot, however, be solved by economic rapprochement alone. True reconciliation demands more than economic interest, just as it demands more than political concern. Reconciliation must penetrate the regions of the heart.

Ho Chi Minh City—Spiritual Reconciliation

Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the North Vietnamese) is one of the last places on earth one would look for signs of spiritual activity. Spurred by the fertile resources of American G.I.s, prostitution, gambling, and black-market trading flourished here during the war.

In spite of its unsavory reputation, Saigon did have a vital Christian presence. A strong Christian and Missionary Alliance Bible school operated for years. Evangelistic campaigns found receptive audiences among both Vietnamese and Americans.

Still, I went to Vietnam in general, and Saigon in particular, knowing I’d find a church gasping for air under the suffocating blanket of communism. I even committed the primo journalistic sin—I wrote the lead to my story on the airplane ride over.

I was wrong. The church is indeed oppressed. Being a Christian often means sacrificing career and creature comforts. But the church is doing very well, thank you. Estimates of the size of the Protestant church in Vietnam in 1975 were usually around 100,000. Today, 15 years after all Western missionaries were forced to leave, after the government made being a Christian the social equivalent of having AIDS, the church has grown to 300,000 members. Marxism has made the Christian church the healthiest institution in the land.

We visit a large Roman Catholic church on Sunday evening. Thousands fill the sanctuary. Others, unable to get a seat inside, stand 20 deep outside, listening to the service on loudspeakers, straining to catch an over-the-shoulders glimpse inside.

I visit a Tin Lanh (Good News) Protestant church. I hear, through a whispering translator at my side, a stirring gospel message. I talk to pastors who tell me of growth and commitment. (They talk to me, although if my visit is observed they will surely be visited the next day by government officials.) Stories of God’s grace are told with an almost happy nonchalance by people who have come to grips with the fact that they may be called upon to suffer for their faith. They have somehow learned that suffering is not the worst thing in the world—disobedience to God is the worst.

Professor Nguyen (not his real name) went to college in America. He was a Christian, but he “found it too easy to be a Christian in the United States. It was socially acceptable. If you wanted a Bible you would get 20.”

He could have stayed in the U.S. but returned to Vietnam to teach. University officials told him he could either teach or attend church, but not both. “They made me study Marxism/Leninism for two years. I quit going to church but had worship with my family at home. I did not give up my faith. On the contrary, for the first time in my life my faith grew. I began to see that the Lord had thrown me in this raging sea not to drown me but to make me clean.”

Nguyen grew in respect in the eyes of his colleagues. “I grew confident. I decided to go to church again. But after a while I was called in again and asked to stop. So I did. But I will keep trying.”

Meanwhile, he makes a difference to scores of students. He exudes energy and the joy of Christ. Of all I am privileged to see in Vietnam, Nguyen’s life and lives like his are the most convincing evidence of hope.

Our Legacy

My last day in Vietnam I wander the streets of Saigon looking for the American legacy. I find a U.S. quarter in an antique shop, I tour a military museum filled with captured F-5s and U.S. tanks, I walk on the grounds of the former U.S. Embassy, now overgrown with head-high weeds and trash. Right now the legacy is one of a lost war. We’re history.

On my flight home through Bangkok, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Chicago, a phrase keeps running through my mind: “All we can do now is pray.”

The phrase has always bothered me. Usually it is intoned in medical cases where everything possible has been done to save a life, but nothing has halted the slide toward death. I think the phrase, unwittingly, betrays our priorities. When faced with a problem, we’ll first try ordinary human measures, then pull out all stops and try extraordinary human measures, and if all else fails, we’ll pray.

Here’s our problem: We need to reconcile ourselves to the Vietnam War and the country of Vietnam. We properly pursue peace through diplomacy and economic aid. We seek resolution through movies and books, believing that if we understand the war we can erase confusion and bitterness. But the national catharsis we are looking for will never come until the hearts of men, the spiritual organs, are touched by a working of God’s grace. Spiritual reconciliation must come along with economic and political reconciliation—not as a last resort.

The Vietnamese church is ready for such an experience. Indeed, the church is to be a profound sign of peace and hope in a society without much of either. I wonder if we are?

It may not be easy helping a nation that defeated us in war. But it is right.

In the face of injustice, rising tension, and military build-up, it is easy to forget that the church has been given “the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:8). When confronted with cunning evil and brute violence, it is easy to ignore Jesus’ injunction to “love your enemies” (Matt. 5:44). Certainly for many conservative churches during the Vietnam War, these imperatives of the gospel were pushed down on our list of priorities.

But now 15 years have gone by since the end of American involvement in Vietnam, and perhaps what we have lacked in speed can be made up in quality. As Terry Muck’s essay in this issue (“An American in Hanoi,” p. 24) makes clear, Vietnam is still a country in need of reconciliation and love.

After World War II, it was easy to play the role of the benevolent winner and generously help those countries that were ruined by the war. But in Vietnam, we did not win. Not only that, but we were torn in two as a nation, united only in our grief over the 58,000 soldiers we lost. In many ways these wounds are still very much with us.

It is the peculiar genius of the gospel to transform the tragic into an epiphany of love. As wounded healers, we are called to act out God’s ministry of redemption. In the context of Vietnam, this means that the American church has an opportunity to incarnate the gospel, to exchange bitter memories for a vision of hope, to reach out in love to those who were our enemies, to go the extra mile of providing aid and services to the winners of the unofficial war.

And this is precisely what some Christian organizations have been doing. Groups such as World Vision, World Relief, Save the Children Federation, OxFam, the Mennonite Central Committee, American Friends, Lutheran Family Services, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and others have cut through the red tape and set up programs that provide health care, vocational training, disaster relief, and other services to this much-victimized nation.

Such efforts do not call into question the legitimacy of our country’s past actions in this region. Nor do they legitimize Vietnam’s current government, which continues to persecute Christians and violate human rights. Rather, these efforts recognize that we are in a different time and situation. The war is over. New strategies and new goals are called for.

Last June the U.S. Department of State urged nongovernmental organizations to be involved in addressing the humanitarian concerns of Vietnam. Many see this, along with its shift in policy toward Cambodia, as a sign that the United States eventually plans to restore official relations with the government of Vietnam.

The time is ripe for the church to exercise its moral leadership and encourage this development. We can be involved in a number of capacities: through supporting medical and economic programs, befriending and sponsoring Amerasian children of American soldiers, sponsoring refugees, or becoming politically involved. (For those churches that want to learn more about current opportunities in Vietnam, World Vision has created a video and a brochure.)

When Christ calls us to action, we cannot table the motion. We are commanded to love, to reconcile. The current situation is not ideal. We would love to send missionaries and to support the indigenous church more actively, and perhaps someday we may be able to do more. But God has given us an open door. Let us walk through it.

By Michael G. Maudlin

The poster in Chicago busses and at “El” stops reads: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill. Greed and Indifference Do.” The ad, which is supposed to convey an AIDS education message, has also played to a mixture of cheers and jeers in New York, San Francisco, and other major urban venues.

The design was produced by a group called Gran Fury, the graphics and advertising arm of the gay activist group ACT-UP. The funds came from a grant from the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

The controversy generated by the ad seemed to center on the fact that the couples shown kissing on the poster were not all your garden-variety pairings. They included a brace of osculating males and two soul sisters, mouth-to-mouth, who did not appear to need resuscitation.

“Repulsive,” said the 60-year-old Eleanor Drayton to a Chicago Tribune reporter. But we find a lot of ads repulsive. What set this ad apart was the diversion of the limited funds available for the important task of AIDS education to promote a political message.

“It is not an AIDS-prevention ad,” Shepherd Smith of Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy (ASAP) told CT. “It is not a meaningful prevention message. Therefore, it has no value to the epidemic.” Surely there is nothing on the poster that will help any individual avoid behavior that could transmit disease.

“It is a political statement,” Smith continued. To most of the public, that political statement may be almost as obscure as any prevention message the advertisement bears.

Is it a political statement about nontraditional sexuality? That it doesn’t matter whom you kiss? That all sexual relations are created equal and have inalienable rights? That may be the message borne by the images.

But the text of the ad seems to be an attack on our society’s slow response to AIDS. It is true that in recent years, the mobilization of our resources to combat Legionnaire’s Disease (which killed mainly white males) was much faster than the response to Toxic Shock Syndrome (which attacked only women), which in turn was much faster than the response to AIDS (which at first attacked only gay men and Haitians). We should all take to heart the notion that a quick response to AIDS would have been far better than a slow one.

But the problem is not with that part of the message. It is with the shifting of responsibility away from the person who indulges in risk-laden sexual activity. Of course kissing can kill. As ASAP’s Smith said: “Scientifically speaking, the poster’s message is flawed. You’re not going to find a serious scientist today who will say that intimate kissing with an end-stage diseased person is not dangerous.”

It seems that Gran Fury does not want people to have to police their own sexual behavior. Not that many years ago, people did not know how AIDS was transmitted. But today, it is hardly an effective AIDS-prevention message to say, “Kissing Doesn’t Kill.” What we have in this poster is the sexual-liberation equivalent of the more familiar “Guns Don’t Kill. People Do.” But whether we are talking viruses or Uzis, the more microbes you spread around or the more assault weapons you import the more likely somebody is going to get killed. When there is a wave of mortality, smart policy makers don’t try to help people shift the responsibility. They mobilize everyone to take responsibility.

But maybe this ad will work out after all. The average rider of Chicago busses has probably not kept up with the political pressures being exerted to speed up medical response to AIDS. Instead, he or she has probably gotten the message that you can get AIDS by having unprotected sex. And maybe he or she will get the right message in spite of the poster: When asked by a radio reporter what the sign meant, a Chicago woman said, “Well, it means that kissing is okay, but if you get greedy and you do too much kissing, it can hurt you.” Right.

By David Neff.

Watch thousands of charismatics, brought together for a week of workshops and worship in Indianapolis’s Hoosier Dome, and what will you see? Hand raising, fervent praying, and exuberant singing, right?

Right. But that’s not all. Not this year. On the thirtieth anniversary of Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett’s resignation from his Episcopal parish in Van Nuys, California (cited by many as a catalytic event in the spread of charismatic renewal to mainline denominations), the movement is coming of age.

At the North American Congress on the Holy Spirit and World Evangelization, held in August, there was an unprecedented emphasis on world evangelization and ministry to the poor, the flowering of seeds planted in another conference three years ago in New Orleans. British renewal leader Michael Harper noted there was not only a call to “personal and national evangelism, but also to a global vision for evangelization.”

Meeting under the theme “Evangelize the World, Now!” participants were urged to count the cost and carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, especially to the poor, even if it means martyrdom. “This is not a ‘bless me’ conference,” said Vinson Synan, chairman of the North American Renewal Service Committee, which sponsored the event. The seriousness of the call mingled with celebratory worship is a bracing combination.

Those evangelicals who have been wary of their more exuberant charismatic and Pentecostal brethren can celebrate this recovery of great compassion and commitment to the Great Commission. Linked with charismatics’ hallmark spiritual vitality and energy, such evangelistic zeal bodes well for the church’s mission mandate.

By Timothy K. Jones.

Recently Ron Sider asked me if I would care to write the foreword to the new edition of his volume Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I was just a little surprised, but immensely pleased that he should ask me to do this. After some preliminary discussion to make sure that he would feel comfortable with what I might say, I gladly agreed to write the foreword.

Sider’s volume has been severely criticized by many conservative evangelicals (including me on a few occasions). But I have also read his volume and strongly urged many others to read it. It is a good book, and one that needs to be read because it deals head-on with the most serious problem facing the Christian church today.

Not long ago I was invited to speak at a retreat for evangelical university students. They asked me: What is the greatest problem facing the church today? Without any hesitation I answered: It is not what you might expect me to say. It is not liberalism or neo-orthodoxy or wrong views of revelation or inspiration or other controversial points in theology (the sort of topics, incidently, I spend most of my time talking and writing about). Nor is it the sort of problems you hear discussed daily in your university classes in sociology. It’s not that these issues are unimportant or that Christians—including evangelical Christians—are uninterested in them. They are important, and we are deeply concerned about them. I hope we are concerned enough to be willing to do something about them. But these definitely do not constitute the overriding problems of the evangelical church today—not as I observe it in North America and Western Europe.

The Pressing Problem

The most serious problem facing today’s church is materialism—materialism not as a philosophical theory, but as a way of life. Serious Christians, of course, will not admit their commitment to materialism. The Bible is so diametrically opposed to it that to profess it and to profess Christianity in one breath is patently absurd. But to profess Christianity and follow a materialistic lifestyle does not appear to be absurd. It seems to be “normal” church life and is, indeed, extraordinarily respectable.

That is why Ron Sider’s message needs to be heard and heeded by the evangelical church today. We may not agree with his analysis of the causes of the world’s ills or with all his proffered solutions. I don’t. But no Christian dare ignore his main point. We are our brothers’ keepers. It is our God-given moral duty to seek, as best we can, to meet their needs.

Naturally I cannot evaluate with any accuracy all the intricate causes of poverty and human suffering. I certainly don’t know the remedies. I am quite sure many of the simple cures for poverty are nonsense. For example, I don’t think a straightforward share-the-wealth program is called for. Nor will ever-larger government handouts solve the problem. They only enslave the poor to perpetual poverty.

Without suggesting for a moment every Christian must do the same, I know certain things are right, and I can do them. I can set my lifestyle a mite below the average in my community. The money I do spend, I can use for truly worthwhile things and not for items that gratify pleasure at the expense of my moral and spiritual growth. I can contribute a minimum of one-tenth of my income to causes directly related to God’s kingdom and not to general charity. To the extent of my ability, I can help out those I see to be in need even if it requires that I make some significant sacrifices. I can vote for just governments, honest administrators, and laws that prevent the exploitation of the innocent, the handicapped, and the powerless. And I can seek to find helpful ways of serving others.

I have profited by reading Sider’s book. He has forced me to think of better ways for Christians who must serve those who have not. And thus I learn by bearing “one anothers burdens to fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2).

A Teenager’s Faith?

I am a rural Lutheran pastor who read your article “The Adult Gospel” [by Larry Poston] in the August 20 issue of CT. I think you hit the bullseye in terms of the problems Christianity faces. The observation that Christianity appeals to a teenage mindset is correct (I got excited about the faith at age 16). You seem to point out that Christianity likes to keep people at a teenage level of faith. Thus, Vietnam veterans or people who have lived “seasoned” lives have two options: accept the teenage frills and thrills of entertainment evangelism or fall into cynicism.

You’ve put your finger on the pulse of a hot issue: the area of “practicality,” which speaks of an Old Testament—rooted faith and so opens a “Pandora’s box” of the basic immanence and transcendence natures of God and God’s daily action. I read your conservative colleagues, apologetically (or defending fiercely) the transcendent Hellenistic notion of a supernatural, intervening idea of God. Scholars who call these assumptions about God’s transcendent nature to task are labeled “liberal.” I submit that if we would stress the immanence side of Christianity rather than a Hellenized version of a God [who] comes out of the sky [to meet our needs miraculously], we’d have a more practical, workable faith that appeals to a wider and older group of people.

Rev. David Coffin

Trinity Lutheran Church (ELCA)

Malinta, Ohio

Having taught personal evangelism in Bible college for ten years and now working specifically in the field of child evangelism, my study and experience validate several significant points in this article. While it is true the vast majority of everyone who receives Christ does so at an early age (our studies show 86% by age 14), it is also true that those older can be effectively evangelized when the simple gospel—salvation by faith alone in Christ alone—is presented clearly. As Poston pointed out, in evangelism we must distinguish between salvation and discipleship.

Rev. Steve Bils, Executive Director

Child Evangelism Fellowship

of Northern Colorado

Loveland, Colo.

Aquinas Redux

Jeffrey Russell [“The Prince of Darkness,” interview, Aug. 20] claims the writings of Thomas Aquinas “collapsed” 600 years ago. I hadn’t noticed, as I was required to study seven years of Thomastic philosophy and theology, full-time, as an ordinary Jesuit in training. The text and lectures were all in Latin, the language he wrote in. Those going to teach either subject had to spend more years in graduate studies.

Maritain and Adler left Judaism for Christianity as a direct result of Thomism. Like all who studied it lifelong, they found it most rewarding.

Dan Lyons

Catholic Communications

Bloomsbury, N.J.

The Prince of Darkness is given closer scrutiny in The Invisible War, by the late Donald Barnhouse. It is an opened window into not only the character of our Enemy, but the hidden struggles involving God, Satan, angels, demons and mankind.

Francis Anderson

Seattle, Wash.

The articles on the Devil were outstanding. I grew up in the fifties and sixties and went to a Methodist church. Having an avid curiosity about horror and evil, I saw many horror movies and read anything I could about mystery and murder. [I got] no information from the church. What stands out in my mind is that the world in general is fascinated with evil, but most human beings still honor and approve good. What bothers me most about how the world views evil is that it sees no answer to it.

Neila Cundith

Mannford, Okla.

They’ll Never Know What Hit Them

A lot of people have been talking about subliminal tapes. You’ve seen the ads: “How to Attract Love”; “Stop Hair Loss”; “How to Be Popular.” All you do is listen to the tape, which is like listening to a trickling brook or a summer breeze. Except that hidden in those pleasant sounds is a message that can change your life. The way they pitch these products, you’d think that for $9.95, even Roseanne Barr could learn to sing.

Now, I know this sounds a little too sneaky, but think of how we could redeem this concept for the Lord. First, you find a willing supermarket owner who will let you handle his store’s piped-in music. Then you create a tape of typical supermarket music, but with a subliminal message: “Repent, because the Day of Judgment is at hand.”

Can you imagine what it would be like?

By the time a shopper got from the produce department to frozen foods, he’d be saved. Put a few Greek verb conjugations in the parking-lot music, and you could ordain him before he gets in the car.

I ran this idea by my pastor, and he said it would never work. “If the ACLU ever heard about it, we’d be chased out of town.”

That poor guy has no vision, as far as I’m concerned. All we’d need to do is throw a little Colossians 3:13 into the ACLU’s music system and we’d be home free.

EUTYCHUS

Clinton Arnold [“Giving the Devil His Due,” Aug. 20] has placed emphasis on a very important feature of the occult, and that is that the desire for power—power over other people—is an important link in demon/human codependency. This present generation of young adults has a disturbing desire for power: power lunches, power clothes, power everything. Worse, we are seeing demon activity in places never seen before. The “druggies” of the sixties who went to India and other places in the East brought back drugs, an interest in other religions, and perhaps demons interested in what seemed to be newly open fields.

Jeffrey Burton Russell is correct: “Whatever is going on or not going on is beyond our powers to define.” Would that we, like he, were “humbled in this experience,” and “wiser than [he] was.”

R. Jim Seibert

Everett, Wash.

SPEAKING OUT

Remove Barriers from Your Church

There was a large sigh of relief and faint applause from many religious leaders over passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The law exempted religious organizations from discriminating against people with disabilities in areas of employment, transportation, telecommunications, and public accommodation.

Instead of silence, we should have heard a rallying cry by Christians to embrace the principles of the ADA. While the church’s legal obligation no longer exists, the moral obligation and spiritual opportunities have not disappeared.

The real barriers to the church’s work for disabled persons are attitudes, not just steps and curbs. Take a closer look at some common objections.

“The cost of such ministry is so high.” Taking the lead in reaching disabled people will indeed cost money. But Christ gives us clear instructions for a cost/benefit analysis on disability ministry. “When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.… Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:13–14).

Whether the costs are incurred in programs or facilities, the church needs to decide by faith that accessibility of its facilities and its programs is a necessary part of serving Christ.

Making your church accessible may not require large expenditures. But if it does, please be encouraged by a local church of 40 members that raised $10,000 to make their circa 1800 building accessible for wheelchairs.

“Where are they? We have only one disabled person in our congregation.” Christ’s command to go into the highways and byways should be taken literally. Disabled persons who are not “mainstreamed” can typically be found in group homes, nursing homes, sheltered workshops, rehabilitation centers, assisted-living centers, or in the homes of their parents.

Assign someone in your church to research where disabled people live or work. Contact local social-service agencies, United Cerebral Palsy, and the Association of Retarded Citizens for information. Canvassing door to door is also a proven method. Then plan for some kind of transportation program. A car with a big trunk can work if money is scarce. A van with a lift communicates “We want you!” in bold letters.

“I don’t feel comfortable with disabled people.” For practical help with these feelings, Joni Eareckson Tada’s book Friendship Unlimited is highly recommended. After spending time with disabled people, you will learn that you look past the physical differences and begin to see persons as they really are. At our program here in Wisconsin, we have had 80 construction volunteers during the last three years and only one of them felt uncomfortable.

“Our church is burned out. We couldn’t add one more ministry!” If your church volunteers feel stretched, recruit disabled people. Disabled people are not looking only to receive; they want to give. One of the greatest frustrations for a disabled person is to have a sharp mind trapped in a body that does not move well or communicate clearly. Many are highly motivated and articulate prayer warriors. Those who are intellectually impaired also have much love to give to the church in the form of practical service.

“We already pay taxes to help with government programs. Our church should focus on the spread of the gospel.” There are 500 million disabled people in the world. Many don’t know the luxury of a wheelchair or the comfort of Christ’s death. We as Christians have an opportunity to touch and teach the gospel in profound ways that cannot be delegated to government agencies.

Now that the Americans with Disabilities Act has become the law of the land, let’s not pass up a wonderful opportunity to follow the law of liberty.

By Steven Jensen, executive director, Christian League for the Handicapped, and president, Christian Council on Persons with Disabilities.

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Thank you for articles on that very unpopular subject concerning Satan and hell. As Christians we are much interested in heaven and all the joys that await the saints. Arnold reminds us there is a satanic kingdom and we are in a war against evil.

I recall the words of the late Flannery O’Connor: “Christianity is a strangely cheery religion. It knows the world wants to pitch itself into hell, is always in the act of doing just that. But, it also knows that nothing but an adamantine will can separate us from the love of Christ.”

Esther Siemens

Mesa, Ariz.

The Deceiver And The Deceived

The [Aug. 20 cover] picture was unnecessary. Why do you need to spend energy, time, and money on “conjuring up” a suitable image [of Satan]? God tells us in his Word what the Devil is like and what he does. Giving credit to a man for doing an excellent job on a picture of the Great Deceiver is being deceived yourself.

Nancy L. Lloyd

Oak Park, Ill.

Covers should be a bold and graphic testimony of the hope that is within us, not the Enemy who stands against us.

Rev. Gerald L. Stigall

Trinity Evangelical Free Church

Windsor, Vt.

Liberalism, Not Mandela, The Target

Your editorial [“An Ambiguous Hero,” by Ben Patterson, Aug. 20] uses Nelson Mandela as a springboard to attack liberalism. I am extremely angry. The man, and African Americans, deserves a lengthier and healthier article. To treat Mandela with such arrogant disdain reveals the author’s pride—using a black leader of enormous status as a simple broom with which to hit liberalism. No mention is made of the context of Mandela’s assessment of Castro, Qaddafi, and Arafat—namely, that they had given him support during the last 20 years and he wouldn’t turn his back on them when things turned to good for him and the ANC. Patterson might be humbled and made to reflect on the ease with which he dismisses Mandela if he were to read what white Christians wrote 30 years ago about Martin Luther King, Jr.

Greg Metzger

Chicago, Ill.

Your editorial on Mandela, South Africa’s ambiguous hero, was timely, accurate, and straight to the heart of the truth. Thanks for having the intestinal fortitude to expose the real Mandela and his real goals.

Dr. Norman Neely

Shreveport, La.

Historical Art For Children

I have read Larry Sibley’s review of The Bible for Children [Books, Aug. 20] and was startled at the description of the illustrations as “too simplified to convey adequate information about the history being narrated.” He must have been looking at the wrong Bible. The whole purpose was to draw children into the Bible text through excellent art. The philosophy of the artwork was to be “highly detailed, realistic, historically accurate, and set in its geographic context.” Tyndale hired a researcher who did nothing but collect authentic archaeological information/artifacts for every illustration before it was painted. [For example,] the backgrounds in the Genesis and Exodus pieces were taken from authentic tomb paintings.

It wouldn’t bother me if the reviewer didn’t like the illustrations—that’s a matter of personal preference. But to say the illustrations are too simplified is inaccurate and erroneous, and it shows a lack of knowledge about art. This is the most detailed biblical art on the market today.

Ron Beers

Tyndale House Publishers

Wheaton, Ill.

Hidden Messages?

Tsk! Tsk! Has our beloved Eutychus forsaken humor in order to slip in a message? From the August 20 issue the following sentence was of interest. “After hearing how it worked, one of the younger elders said she thought it made sense to nudge some of our unsaved attenders to invite Christ into their lives [emphasis mine].”

Eutychus, please leave the messages out, and as in those thrilling days of yesteryear, just bring us a note of humor.

Rev. Ross E. Marion

Wake Chapel Church

Fuquay-Varina, N.C.

Hezekiah’S Legacy

I enjoyed reading Philip Yancey’s column “The Balaam Syndrome” [Aug. 20], and his point is well taken. But there is an aside never mentioned, or at least never acknowledged. The classic implication that Hezekiah should have “quit while he was ahead” in terms of his additional years may need reconsideration. Despite his abuse of the knowledge of his future, his 15-year extension gave Israel their next king. At first glance, Manasseh doesn’t seem too commendable, seeing he was more pagan than the pagans. But what a price God places on repentance and forgiveness. Because through Manasseh, he purposed the King of Kings to be a direct descendent. An afterthought? I doubt it. Who but God could redeem a wasted life and make it count for everything.

Jo LeMay Rutledge

Fort Worth, Texas

A Second Patriarchal Visit

The announcement of the recent visit to the United States by the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, Dimitrios I of Constantinople, contained a historical oversight [World Scene, Aug. 20]. The comment that “It was the first visit ever of an Orthodox patriarch to this country” overlooked the historic visit of the Patriarch of Antioch, Syria, Ignatius IV, in the summer of 1985. Congratulations on the August inclusion.

Bradley Nassif

Waukegan, Ill.

Fundamentalists “R” Us

In World Scene [News] for August 20 you fall into the egregious misuse of language that the secular media have been promoting for some time with the report, “Fundamentalists Win Votes.” You are referring to the hard-line, orthodox Muslims as “fundamentalists.” Fundamentalist, as you well know, is originally a Christian term and an honorable one, and it shouldn’t be applied promiscuously to Muslims, Communists, et al., because to do so discredits honorable Christians by association. Just think: We don’t speak of “fundamentalist” Democrats or “fundamentalist” liberals. One could logically speak of “catholic” Muslims (blending Sunnite and Shi‘ite and Ismaili strains, for example), or even of “catholic” Protestants (ecumenical enthusiasts), but to call such Muslims, if they do exist, and Protestants “catholics” in a headline would be misleading to say the least. Let people use fundamentalist this way and you may soon have to hear proselytizing Communists or Moonies called evangelicals.

Harold O. J. Brown

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Ill.

Medema A Refreshing Exception

I was disappointed by the negative spin put on Ken Medema’s journey of faith by Timothy K. Jones [Profile, Aug. 20], What Jones portrays as a crisis of faith is, perhaps, not that at all. What Medema has experienced, it seems to me, is not a crisis of faith, but a Lord who has spoken to him in new ways. The fact that those concerned with social-justice issues become “an anathema to evangelical audiences” is one reason more of us do not put ourselves in that theological category. When evangelical conservatism stops requiring of its adherents right-wing political views, more of us may be willing to join its ranks.

I enjoy modern Christian music, but much of it is meaningless because of a triumphalism that makes it incapable of, as Medema puts it, “looking at Mon-, day’s realities in light of Sunday.” Medema is a refreshing exception.

Ronald W. Felton

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church

Columbia, S.C.

Courting Disaster?

The July 16 article “Why Can’t We Work Together?” [by William Bentley Ball] caused me great concern about the possibility of orthodox evangelicals and orthodox Catholics uniting on common points of beliefs to effect a change on politicians in this country. It is not possible to affect a moral atmosphere in America by appealing to Caesar to enforce laws for the advancement of Christianity. If this were possible, Jesus would have made that known to us by approaching the Roman government of his time. Instead, he appealed to the individual heart to bring about a change in the life.

If this or any country is to be won for Christ, it can only be done by the preaching of the gospel to change people, and not by the masses petitioning its legislative bodies. History informs us of the dangers that can take place when the church gets into the position of political influence. If the Christian churches in America succeed in such a union as suggested [in Ball’s] article, I fear it will ultimately lead to disaster.

Tony Russo

Fresno, Calif.

I was pleased to read “Why Can’t We Work Together?” for it promoted unity within the Christian church. Operation Rescue is an example of this; it is composed of Christians who come from many different denominations to unite in a common goal of protecting both women and children from the tragedy of abortion—to promote the sanctity of human life. My faith has been enriched and strengthened by the fellowship I have had with my brothers and sisters in Christ. Although church unity is often preached, it is uplifting to observe and participate in its fruition!

Drew Reardon

Costa Mesa, Calif.

While it is true we have much in common, there are reasons why historically Protestants could not, and for the present should not, work hand in hand with Catholics. In church-and-state matters where Catholics are predominant, the church tends to use the state as an instrument not only to impose her will, but also to suppress non-Catholics. Her acceptance of the principle of separation in the U.S.A., I believe, is only a matter of convenience.

It is disconcerting to see Protestants stretching their hands across this wide gulf. This is evidenced by the number of Protestant leaders trying to have an audience with the Pope on his last U.S. visit—something unthinkable a few short years back. Some scholars believe Revelation 13 predicts a forthcoming unholy wedlock. We shall see.

Gerry Cabalo

Lake Elsinore, Calif.

“Wrong-Headed” Ideologies

I am dismayed, although not surprised, by Charles Colson’s column derisively entitled “Look Who’s in the Rose Garden” [July 16] in which he takes George Bush to task for inviting members of a community specifically protected by the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990 (homosexuals) to join with others covered by this long-overdue bill in witnessing its signing. Colson’s strident, alarmist, and specious argument is little more than a thinly veiled example of gay bashing, a reactionary homophobic militancy in the face of enlightened leadership.

His argument that homosexual behavior “has been regarded as immoral and perverse” throughout Western history calls to mind the specter of the oppression of other groups only recently enfranchised, including women and blacks, whose members were for centuries considered inferior at best, and perhaps even seductive sinners beyond the reach of Christ’s redemptive love. Colson talks out of both sides of his mouth when he espouses the protection of everyone’s rights, and in the same breath submits that gays are different and therefore not entitled to quite the same privileges as others.

I urge Colson and those he purports to represent to renounce the ignorance, fear, and hatred underlying their attitudes towards homosexuality, and to embrace the inclusive fellowship of all mankind, an eternal truth for which our Lord was martyred at Calvary. Can we do less than crucify our wrong-headed ideologies as we seek to answer the upward call of God in Christ Jesus?

Joseph Wei

Farmington, Conn.

Christianity And World Religions

Belatedly, I read Colin Chapman’s article “The Riddle of Religions” in the May 14 issue. If plans go through for the “Parliament of World Religions” proposed for Chicago in 1993 to commemorate the 1893 World Parliament of Religions (and even if they do not), the position of evangelical Christianity vis-à-vis the non-Christian religions will be a major (if not the major) issue in the 1990s. Chapman is at least correct in saying that evangelicals have very little understanding of the major non-Christian religions. This is true even of many who specialize in the Eastern cults.

I believe the time has come to point out the best as well as the worst in the various world religions and explain to evangelical Christians why they are inadequate and misleading when it comes to matters of salvation of the soul and pointing men to the true and living God.

David J. Hesselgrave

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Deerfield, Ill.

The first time former executive editor Terry Muck had a chance to go to Vietnam, he played the draft lottery and won. At number 349, his name never came up when the Selective Service Commission filled its annual quota of young American men for the armed forces.

Like most of us in that select group who know the difference between 4-F and 1-A, Terry can never forget Vietnam. When his second chance came, he jumped at the opportunity to visit the land where 58,000 of his fellow baby boomers died. And although this was to be a peaceful mission—not intended to uncover military secrets—war and deception crept onto the scene in a most unusual way.

It was while he was trying to obtain a vaccination for bubonic plague (highly recommended for people traveling to Vietnam) that Terry learned that supplies of the vaccine were completely depleted. Why? Every soldier involved in last December’s Panama invasion needed to be vaccinated. And since it takes three months for the vaccine to begin working, the military option was being planned even as official statements maintained we had no intention of invading. Hmmm.

Fortunately, the news coming out of Vietnam these days is good, as you will see from Terry’s report beginning on page 24.