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Evangelistic Round-Up

Redeemed? Say So!, by Robert J. Plekker (Harper & Row, 1977, 191 pp., $3.95 pb), HIS Guide to Evangelism, by Paul Little and others (InterVarsity, 1977, 157 pp., $2.50 pb), That None Be Lost, by Oliver V. Dalaba (Gospel Publishing House, 1977, 127 pp., $1.25 pb), Go Make Disciples, by Rolf A. Syrdal (Augsburg, 1977, 128 pp., $3.50), I Believe in Evangelism, by David Watson (Eerdmans, 1977, 190 pp., $2.95 pb), and Evangelism in a Tangled World, by Wayne McDill (Broadman, 1977, 181 pp., $3.95 pb), are reviewed by Richard V. Peace, assistant professor of evangelism, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

Many people are concerned about evangelism. Witness the six different traditions represented in these books, which span the ecclesiastical spectrum from an Anglican rector to an Assemblies of God minister and in between a Lutheran professor, a Southern Baptist denominational executive, a Christian Reformed layman, and an interdenominational campus minister. Each of them is concerned that we get on with the job of sharing the good news. But when it comes to how each one views the work of evangelism, we find quite different viewpoints.

Robert J. Plekker is a Michigan dentist and a layman in the Christian Reformed Church. He opens his book by commending as a model for personal witnessing a man he once met on a plane to Florida. Plekker first noticed the man when he rushed into the plane, late: “His shirt [was] half way out of his pants, his tie was loose and his head was topped off with a red golfer’s cap … He ran down the aisle with bags, camera, books and other paraphernalia” and sat down next to Plekker. Then in a loud, embarrassing way he introduced himself, and proceeded to “witness” to Plekker. Apparently this gentleman confronted each and every stranger he met, without fail, with a plan of salvation. Later that day, he and Plekker shared a fifty-mile car trip in Florida that took twenty-four hours to complete because of this man’s insistence upon stopping for every hitchhiker so he could confront them with his message until they literally “broke down.”

In sharp contrast is an anecdote cited by Mark Pettersen in HIS Guide to Evangelism: “An agnostic friend of mine was approached by a Christian with the lecture approach. After the Christian made his first point, my friend objected that he was not ready to grant the existence of any God let alone a God who loved him but the Christian insisted they finish the outline before they discussed that issue. My friend was forced to listen to a presentation that obviously did not relate to him. The immediate effect was that he lost both warmth for the Christian as a person and freedom to ask further questions.” A style of witness commended in one book is condemned in another. Although the contrast between books is generally not this pointed, it is interesting to note the wide range of ways in which evangelism is perceived.

Oliver V. Dalaba in That None Be Lost uses what might be called a potpourri approach to evangelism. Rather than examining anything in detail, he gives us lists. For example, he discusses eleven methods of outreach, nine philosophies of outreach, eight witnessing plans, seven witnessing places, and six guidelines to compassion. His book tends to be a series of loosely related snippets of information. Dalaba’s approach is oriented to the needs and concerns of the Assemblies of God. (He makes frequent reference, without explanation, to such programs as Royal Rangers and Missionettes.)

Rolf Syrdal, former director of world missions for the American Lutheran Church, is more theological. Although Dalaba focuses on the “have to” in a summary sort of way, Syrdal looks at the theological and historical issues involved in evangelism. He deals with such areas as the relationship between baptism and evangelism, preaching and personal evangelism, and evangelism and Christian service. He is concerned that evangelism be directed not only outside into the unbelieving world, but inward toward those church members who have stopped living in Christ: “At the close of the service of baptism of infants, … the parents and sponsors are admonished to nurture the spiritual life of the children so they will be brought up in the faith.… The very fact that this admonition is necessary implies that it is possible that a child who is baptized may later break the covenant by willful acts.… The prophets were evangelists to the people of the covenant who had departed from the faith.… We are to proclaim (the Gospel) also to those who have fallen away from God and need to be brought back in repentance and faith. The church must have an ‘outreach’ of the Gospel to those outside the church, but it is also necessary that the church has an evangelical ‘inreach’ … to save those who have left Christ.”

The concern in HIS Guide to Evangelism is the college campus. These eighteen articles (by sixteen authors) appeared originally in Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship’s magazine, HIS. As in any collection, the quality of the articles varies. Many, however, are very useful (and not just in a campus context). Some of them, such as Beckey Manley’s “Sharing Christ, Ourselves and Pizza … All at Once” are excellent. She begins: “Christians and non-Christians have something in common: They are both uptight about evangelism. The common fear of Christians seems to be ‘How many people did I offend this week?’ They think that they must offend in order to be a good evangelist. A tension begins to build inside: Should I be sensitive to people and forget about evangelism or should I blast them with the gospel and forget about this person?” She goes on to discuss how we can learn to be ourselves as well as letting others be themselves; at the same time we are transparently honest about Jesus and his claims. This article alone is worth the price of the book.

Often in stark contrast to that approach is Plekker’s book, Redeemed? Say So!, in which the approach is much more mechanistic (e.g., Chapter 13 in which twenty-one “Satanic Tangents” are listed along with concise suggestions on how to get the conversation back on track again) and high pressure (e.g., “The seventh rule may not sound too nice but it is essential. Avoid allowing someone the ‘out’ of thinking it over. Giving someone time to ponder things is bad kingdom business”).

The real gems in this set of six books are David Watson’s I Believe in Evangelism and Wayne McDill’s Evangelism in a Tangled World. Watson’s book is the best general introduction to evangelism I have seen in years. It is profoundly biblical and intensely practical. Watson, pastor of St. Cuthbert’s Anglican Church in York, England, begins with a series of word studies (“evangelism,” “gospel,” “proclamation”), which are academically sound and immensely readable. He establishes a biblical foundation. His chapters on personal evangelism and follow-up are filled with insight and his chapter on evangelism and the local church is a blueprint for healthy church growth. The special thing about the book comes in the final two chapters in which Watson explains the relationship between worship and evangelism and then discusses “the spirit in evangelism.” He begins his penultimate chapter: “In the 1,470 page report of the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelisation there are only 2 short paragraphs specifically on worship. However, on many occasions I have seen the close link between the praise of God, when marked by the freshness and freedom of the spirit’s presence, and powerful evangelism.” He goes on then to amplify and illustrate this relationship. In his final chapter there is as clear, profound, and moving a discussion of the work of the Holy Spirit in evangelism as I have seen.

Wayne McDill is a Southern Baptist, serving as an executive in the Evangelism Division in Texas. McDill’s book shows deep insight into the people we are seeking to reach through our evangelism. Other books (e.g. Plekker’s) seem preoccupied with the Christian’s role in evangelism but McDill forces us to examine our methods and message from the point of view of those to whom our efforts are directed. He constantly asks: Will they understand? Does this touch people at a point of authentic need? For example, in discussing the message of the Gospel, he begins with the biblical material, but then “repaints the ancient pictures” by means of a series of metaphors that will communicate the Gospel content to modern man. He then goes on to discuss conversion, beginning with what he calls “biblical psychology” and then exploring the cognitive, moral, emotional, and volitional aspects of the conversion experience. His examination of the Great Commission is by means of seven questions or options—“Will the believer be characterized in the mind of the church as a salesman or as a witness for Christ?” (he opts for discipleship and for witnesses). Either McDill’s or Watson’s book would be an excellent text in a course on evangelism. Their attitudes and insights will serve as a corrective for much that is being written about evangelism today. They will stimulate each of us to get on with the task of sharing Jesus with others in a loving way.

What About The New Religions?

The New Religious Consciousness, edited by Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah (University of California, 1976, 400 pp., $14.95, $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Kenneth W. Shipps, associate professor of history, Trinity College, Deerfield, Illinois.

From what might be called the new Fertile Crescent of the world comes the first of a projected series of books on the new religious consciousness. Two professors of the University of California at Berkeley have edited the essays of graduate students and contributed their own thoughts in pondering the “deepest meanings” of the cultural upheavals of the sixties. Using social science techniques, they report on nine of the scores of more or less religious groups that flourish in the Bay area: the Healthy-Happy-Holy Organization, Hare Krishna, Divine Light (Maharaj Ji), the New Left, the Human Potential Movement, Synanon, the Christian World Liberation Front, the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and the Church of Satan. Besides these nine case studies there are several other essays including three fascinating ones on how “traditional religion” has responded to the youth “counterculture” and two that project four alternative futures. The volume also includes a summary of the data collected by Robert Wuthnow, who designed and supervised a random survey of the religious awareness, beliefs, and practices of 1,000 Bay Area residents in 1973.

Filmstrips

Thank You, God is another of the fine products for children from the Thomas Klise Company (Box 3418, Peoria, IL 61613). Designed as a continuation of the biblical material in Praise the Lord (see Oct. 21, 1977, issue, p. 32), it leads children to praise and thank God not only for the revelation of his Word, but also of his world. This filmstrip does require careful preparation by the teacher. Delightfully animated for the very young.

Also from Klise, but for adults, is A Thanksgiving Service, which sensitively blends photos of nature and man’s stewardship as a sacred and secular idyll. We hear both sexes give genuine thanks.

Even though The Spanish Missions: Yesterday’s Dream is about the California missions that were established after the Pilgrims had already come ashore in New England, it is well to remember that the missionary impulse to the New World of which the California missions were a part began two centuries before the Pilgrims arrived. This filmstrip seriously discusses the pluses and minuses of Spanish missions. It raises questions of a historical nature that are also relevant to Protestants. This is a secular production from Multi-Media (Box 5097, Stanford, CA 94305) meant for schools, but it can be studied by churches, particularly as a balance to foreign programs that too often seem happily and enthusiastically oblivious to some of the consequences of mission practices. It is a fair and balanced presentation, but the filmstrip gives no answers to the questions it asks.

Shocking and sobering are the words to describe Christians & Jews: A Troubled Brotherhood. This two-part Alba House (Canfield, OH 44406) production for teens and adults has no peer in the rendering of its theme. Finely crafted in the hands of Suzanne Noffke, a Dominican sister, these filmstrips are an artistically powerful presentation of the troubled relations between church and synagogue over the centuries. The story is told with striking examples of Christian anti-Semitic art that is rarely seen. The music background, by Bloch, Bruch, and Partos, conveys the anguish of the Holocaust. Although this production ought to be viewed by every Christian, there are two troubling aspects to its viewpoint. One is the assumption that anti-Semitism is partly rooted in the Gospel accounts themselves, and the other is the assumption that anti-Semitism is mostly a Christian problem rather than a universal one. These filmstrips deserve wide circulation among Christians.

Although tame by today’s standards, some have thought Gustav Doré’s lithographs of the works of Dante a nineteenth-century excursion into pious voyeurism. However Gustav Doré’s Vision of the Bible is an interesting period piece from Contemporary Drama Service (Box 475, Downers Grove, IL 60515). The black and white pictures have been tinted to add dramatic color. The National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception from Vedo Films (85 Longview Rd., Port Washington, NY 11050) is an exquisite tour of the largest Roman Catholic building in North America. It is aesthetically pleasing, but Protestant viewers will be amazed (or dismayed) at the strength of Marian devotion that raised this incomparable structure in the heart of Washington, D.C. A lavishly illustrated booklet comes with it.

The Great Men of Art series from Encyclopaedia Britannica (425 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611) is an excellently prepared program on da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Van Eyck, and Dürer. All of these artists worked within the Christian milieu; their most memorable works are scenes of biblical motifs. Sadja Herzog of Ohio State University notes the spiritual impulses of the Renaissance and the Reformation. This is particularly evident in the Dürer segment, the great Protestant engraver and friend of Luther.

DALE SANDERS

Portland, Oregon.

Wuthnow’s work is so valuable that it resulted in a companion volume, The Consciousness Reformation (1976, University of California). There Wuthnow details the methodology and results of his survey. In Wuthnow’s essay based on his survey he found that only one out of four in the Bay Area was aware of even one of the thirteen new religious groups listed for the area. Wuthnow’s conclusions suggest that all these movements have garnered their adherents from the better educated; also, interest in counterculture groups is likely to remain limited to a very small minority and only in the years of their youth. In his book he also traces through American history what he calls four symbolic universes: theistic, individualistic, social scientific, and mystical. Unfortunately his projections of religious typology on American history and contemporary religious belief, as well as his theory of change through generational conflict, are misleading and reductionistic.

Each of the movements studied provides a fascinating profile in itself, and in some cases they clearly were an exotic response to the turbulent sixties. Also each chapter suggests why millions of Americans have recently experimented with nontraditional religions and lifestyles. For example, through the Healthy-Happy-Holy process participants find release from the pressures of the material world, a purifying lifestyle, and inner harmony with their Creator. To set themselves apart adherents have adopted the dress of Sikhism—a white robe crowned by a turban. They want to lead the world into a new age of Aquarius.

With the designation “quasi-religious,” the editors can show a more intimate connection between the alternative lifestyles of the seventies and the burned-out political activism of the sixties, but not without straining. Bellah insists that there “was something religious” about the political activism of the period, but he suggests that it was the homelessness, the daring, and the disaffection of youth. Bellah’s imprecise language about religiousness, which is shared by other essayists, leads to confusing, exaggerated, and misleading links between religious, social, and political radicals. In fact only occasional examples are provided to show any connection between the newly religious and the leadership of the broader movements of the time from the civil rights movement through the antiwar movement to the women’s rights movement.

The essays by Donald Heinz on the Christian World Liberation Front, an evangelical group founded in 1969 (much of which survives in the Berkeley Christian Coalition), and by Randall Alfred on the Church of Satan, headed by Anton LeVey, offer brilliant sketches of those groups. Bellah, who is widely known for his oft-reprinted 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America,” in a series of sweeping generalizations assesses the decade of the sixties as an “erosion” of the basic systems of meaning in American history: biblical religion and utilitarian individualism. Bellah sees self-interest undermining “conscience,” his strange paradigm of biblical religion. Religion itself “became for many a means for the maximization of self-interest with no effect link to virtue, charity or community.” Bellah also sees the rising prestige of science, technology, and bureaucracy as further supporting utilitarian individualism and the consequent demise of shared values and ends. Glock, a leading survey researcher, has quite a different set of assertions about science. For him the sciences do not contribute a world view, though they do conflict “with supernatural and individual modes of consciousness.” The sciences must interact with all sorts of forces from the biological to the sociological. From all this monumental reductionism Glock and Bellah proceed to their interpretations of the sixties and beyond.

For Bellah the new consciousness turned its back on utilitarian individualism, indeed the whole apparatus of modern industrial society. Similarly Glock, who evidendy also likes to have his speculations published, says that the counterculture inspired a disenchantment with the historic view that man could control his environment. For Bellah America may continue its mindless accumulation of wealth and power; it may “relapse” into traditional, persecuting authoritarianism as symbolized by a growing “conservative Protestant fundamentalism”; or improbably, as Bellah himself suggests, a revolutionary religious change may promote “greater concern for harmony with nature and between human beings.” This change would provide the simple, free culture suggested in the values and worship of the new groups.

Glock maintains that a “new cognition” has arisen out of the sects of the sixties. This new way “to comprehend the world, but unlike its American predecessors, is not one given to shaping and finding meaning in the world.” In part, according to Glock and contrary to Bellah, the youth of the sixties reflected their predecessors in their search for more individualism and in their condemnation of a people who had turned too far from the God of their creation. Yet the counterculture denied prevailing views and adopted “the new cognition” of the sciences, which Glock sees as the wave of the future. This scientific view, which has emerged slowly in this century, stresses a lack of consensus, a limit to human knowledge in a complex social and biological environment, a set of relative and ambiguous values, and no possible answers to questions of ultimate meaning.

Thus the book ends pessimistically in unsupported or reductionistic speculation, hypotheses not unlike what the curious professors had found in research prior to their own investigations. Certainly we know more about a few marginal Bay Area religious groups. Several researchers used new methods of social research well, and Wuthnow’s survey of religious beliefs will remain valuable for comparative research. Yet many of the groups have few members and a declining impact. Other movements might have proved more useful for the research and related more to national followings; these include the evangelical charismatics, the Zenists, TM, Muslims, or even the Unification Church. But of course part of the problem in the book is how and when to relate local interests to the larger view. The editors attempt to relate the upheavals of the sixties to history, to the national scene, and to future religious scenes; their efforts, though bold and full of insight, become highly speculative. It appears that a certain millenarian effervescence has captured the professors; they tend to confuse peripheral, transitory religious movements with long-term fundamental change.

More effective in surveying a broader scope is Religious Movements in Contemporary America, edited by I. Zaretsky and M. Leon (1975, Princeton University). Without the coordinated financial backing of the Berkeley group these writers set forth more theoretical perspectives. Subjects include such groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Mormons, Afro-Americans, Meher Baba. Chapters relate to law, music, linguistics, theology, political science, and homiletics. This massive book also has a forty-three page bibliography.

Another broad book on contemporary British and international religious movements is Sectarianism: Analyses of Religious and Non-Religious Sects, edited by Roy Wallis (1975, Halsted/Wiley). This book contains useful distinctions to separate the religious from the nonreligious. It has essays on the Krishna movement, Scientology, and various therapeutic sects. Perhaps with criticism and competition, researchers on the new religious consciousness in the new Fertile Crescent will give us more thorough studies.

Although interest in new religions is on the rise, none of the recent works has used a Christian theological perspective in assessing their work. Making generalizations about religious consciousness in America has led to fewer differentiations between the myriad religious groups in the world, past and present. Hence the CWLF, an innovative expression of evangelicalism, submerges into the counterculture as some kind of countercultural force against the overriding traditions of American Christianity. Generalizations on the relationship between peripheral sects and predominant christianizing and dechristianizing movements need more refinement than can be found in most of these books. Also, techniques of religious studies, especially in the Glock-Bellah work, have difficulty accounting for shifts within so voluntaristic a scene as American religion. They tend to overplay an undefined traditional religion or make rash demarcations about major changes in a complex, variable environment. And none of these books point out how destructive these sects can be. Christian churches have long had ways to differentiate between spooky, heretical, and destructive sects as compared with a more serious, religious experience.

Edifying Addresses

Our Sovereign God, edited by James Boice (Baker, 1977, 175 pp., $4.95 pb), is reviewed by D. A. Carson, associate professor of New Testament, Northwest Baptist Theological Seminary, Vancouver, British Columbia.

The title of this book captures a theme that has in recent years rekindled a lot of interest among evangelicals; but the subtitle more accurately reflects the contents of this book. Here are fifteen addresses presented to the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology by seven men. John R. W. Stott deals with “The Sovereignty of God the Son” and with “The Sovereign God and the Church.” Roger R. Nicole expounds “The ‘Five Points’ and God’s Sovereignty,” “The Doctrines of Grace in Jesus’ Teaching,” “Optimism and God’s Sovereignty,” and the historical implications of “Soli Deo Gloria.” Stuart D. Sacks draws relationships between “God’s Sovereignty and Old Testament Names for God,” and James I. Packer contributes a section “On Knowing God.” R. C. Sproul follows up the latter theme with “Why We Do Not Know God” and “Why We Must Know God,” and then discusses two further topics, “Discerning the Will of God” and “Prayer and God’s Sovereignty.” Ralph L. Keiper gives us “The Key to Knowing God” and “Witnessing and God’s Sovereignty.” The editor, James M. Boice, seeks to reconcile “Disobedience and God’s Sovereignty.” I confess I found the book extraordinarily difficult to evaluate, not so much because of the diversity of approaches and of merit from chapter to chapter (a problem in most symposia), but because I enjoyed and appreciated the work more than my critical faculties tell me I should.

The unifying feature is the forum at which they were delivered rather than some common theme. For example, Stott’s second message affirms that “[the] purpose of our sovereign God is not just to save isolated individuals, but to call out a people for himself.” Stott then expounds Acts 2:42–47 in a manner that would be acceptable anywhere in evangelicalism, not just at a Reformed conference. The exposition, as one might expect from Stott, is competent and telling; but its link with the “theme” of the book is no more than could be generated by considering the connection between any biblical passage and the sovereignty of God. The same artificiality afflicts more than half the chapters in the book, but comes to its apex in the second of the four sections into which the book is divided. That section, “Knowing the Sovereign God,” has very little within it that has any exclusive connection to Reformed theology.

The diversity of approaches adopted by the various contributors adds to the reader’s awareness of disarray. In his chapter “On Knowing God,” Packer consciously presents his material as an exposition of Calvin’s thought. In one of his four chapters, Nicole seeks to reformulate the traditional “five points” in ways open to less ambiguity, effectively jettisoning TULIP en route while retaining its essential content. Keiper is largely anecdotal; Sproul, though scarcely less so, organizes his material topically. Boice tries to deal with the difficult topic “Disobedience and God’s Sovereignty” by expounding selected parts of Jonah; but the limitations of the passages chosen preclude the possibility of admitting important considerations from elsewhere, though the centrality of the topic makes some of the exposition forced—a classic case of the mutually destructive homiletical marriage between exposition of a major topic and exposition of a restricted passage.

To this methodological disarray must be added two or three major errors. Considering the fruit of Anabaptist research during the last three decades, it is astonishing to be told that “The Anabaptists of Calvin’s day were similar to the liberal and radical theologians of our time, for they appealed to the spirit in their own minds rather than what was said in the Scriptures. They said, ‘Because we have spiritual intuitions that come strong upon us, we are going to follow them. We accept them as from the Spirit of God; if this means leaving the Bible behind, well, so much the worse for the Bible!’ Calvin denied this, for he denied that the Spirit contradicts himself.” No doubt that is the way Calvin perceived things; but Calvin never enjoyed any first-hand knowledge of the leaders of the Anabaptists, whose writings portray them to be no less biblically oriented (to say the least) than any of the other branches of the Reformation. A little later in the book, a writer takes pains to differentiate between the person who knows God’s will as revealed in Scripture, and the one who seeks to discover it when it is not so revealed. “It is one thing,” we are told, “to put out a fleece in attempting to discover that which God has not revealed. But to test that which God has revealed is to insult the integrity of his word, and I will not do it” (p. 93). I will try not to do it, too; but I can’t help remembering that when Gideon put out the fleece—twice, at that—it was for no other purpose than to test that which God had indeed already revealed.

Again, when a contributor writes that in forty years “I think I have heard only one truly honest prayer from the pulpit,” does he intend to use hyperbole to underline the remarkable candor and humility of the example that he then proceeds to give? It must be so, for I cannot believe his ecclesiastical experience is as limited as his words suggest.

Despite my criticisms, however, I find this little book quite compelling. It cannot be compared with Grace Unlimited (edited by Clark Pinnock), for the latter is openly polemical and designed as a symposium of written essays, whereas Our Sovereign God expounds its position with little polemic, and is scarcely more than transcribed addresses. So little concerned is this book to offer a definitive defense of Reformed theology that there is virtually no mention of such topics as covenant, Romans 9 or Ephesians 1, decree, ordo salutis, or a crux interpretum like First John 2:2. Yet this formal lack nonetheless conspires to make this book a helpful, edifying volume, eminently useful in a wide reading circle. To say this is not to despise the polemical work or to give it no place; but it is to say that its place is rarely for edification per se. Our Sovereign God is a work that, though not very profound, is not polemical either, and is edifying.

Although the reader must put up with an informality of style more suitable behind the pulpit than on the printed page, yet he does not have to read far before gaining genuine and valuable insights. One man writes, “Knowledge of God is more than any particular experience of God. For, like the Biblical writers, Calvin comes out of an era when people were less self-absorbed than we are. They were more interested in the realities that they experienced than in their experience of those realities” (p. 63). Another says, “Foolishness is in many of the catalogues of serious sins in the New Testament, along with adultery and murder and things like that. Foolishness is a moral refusal to deal honestly with the truth” (p. 81). And peppered through the book are choice quotations from Calvin, Wesley (!), Warfield, Kierkegaard, Geoffrey Fisher, Brunner, and others.

If you are looking for a book that will establish the truth of Reformed theology, look elsewhere. If you are looking for a generally interesting and edifying collection of sermons, this is for you.

Teaching Them All Things

With Christ in the School of Disciple Building, by Carl Wilson (Zondervan, 1976, 336 pp., $5.95 pb), is reviewed by Peter R. Grosso, pastoral intern, Cedar Park United Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

From a thorough study of the life of Christ Wilson finds evidence for seven steps in developing disciples: repentance and faith, enlightenment and guidance, ministry training and appreciation of benefits, leadership development and government under God, reevaluation and separation, participation and delegation, and the exchanged life and worldwide challenge. He underscores the urgent need for a balanced biblical emphasis and method for discipleship.

The church’s failure to do this, Wilson thinks, has been the pivotal factor in the crisis now facing the world, particularly Western society. The church has unintentionally through enculturation of the Gospel ceased to build disciples effectively. The incompleteness with which many American Christians interpret the Great Commission is characteristic of this. Often evangelism is emphasized to the neglect of Christ’s command to teach believers to obey Christ’s teachings. Our cultural, social, and political responsibilities are frequently ignored. The church, therefore, has fallen critically short in obedience to Christ’s command to prevent corruption and to drive back darkness, often sinning by placing the pursuit of blessing and man’s well-being above the service and praise of God.

In the midst of this dangerous vacuum of adequate Christian teaching, secular humanism is succeeding in its bid to control our minds, lives, and institutions. Wilson points out that today many churches are subservient to this deceptive philosophy. Our public school system is another sphere of its influence. Wilson traces the history of the causes for the decline of biblical discipleship and lay ministry since the early church. He also delineates the trends causing the loss of effectiveness in disciple building in the United States and the corresponding loss of the church’s influence in our society.

Yet Wilson sees the present kairos as unique for the restoration of the New Testament method of discipleship. Both positive and negative factors could contribute to such a restoration, he thinks, resulting in the return of the church to her rightful identity as God’s holy and healing assembly in an evil and broken world. He calls the church to return to the faithful pursuit of her Lord’s will, and emphasizes the need for making disciples who are able to live the exchanged life, a relatively stable, consistent walk in the Holy Spirit.

The book is instructive and will be valuable for the pastor or layperson.

Briefly Noted

Booksellers, librarians, and bibliophiles take note. Religious Reading 3 appeared late last year, third in a series of annual surveys of religious book publishing in the United States (Consortium Books [Box 9001, Wilmington, NC 28401], 313 pp., $15). Some 1,577 books that were published just in 1975 are classified into thirty-two categories and briefly described (but rarely evaluated). The author and title indexes are essential since many books aren’t classified where one might expect. The listing is definitely not complete, for six of the twenty-two 1975 books that we had considered “choice” are not included. But it has improved considerably since the first in the series. Both popular and scholarly books are included, as are books for children. Many reprints are listed, but contrary to the publisher’s intention, they are not always indicated as such. The two previous volumes are still in print. As this series continues, becomes more complete, enlarges some of the descriptions while shortening others, and adds a subject index, it will become an increasingly valuable tool for every religious bookstore and church or school library.

A recent reference book to assist elementary-age children when reading their Bibles and preparing for family devotions and Bible lessons is The Children’s Illustrated Bible Dictionary by V. Gilbert Beers (Nelson, 316 pp., $7.95) with 1,214 alphabetical entries. Each entry takes one-fourth of a large-size page and has a full-color illustration of the person, place, thing, or concept that is described. There is no denominational bias. An example for four consecutive entries: “Day’s Journey,” “Deacon,” “Dead Sea,” and “Debir.” One serious drawback (although some may not consider it so) is the absence of entries on most of the commonly asked about Bible words relating in some way to sex. If your child asks who publicans are, he can look it up here; but if he asks about harlots, you’re on your own. Baptism and murder are here, but not circumcision or adultery. Both theologically and practically, I think it reflects poorly on the author and publisher that they would presume to omit so many God-inspired words.

For a first-hand account of the tragic Ugandan situation, read Idi Amin Dada: Hitler in Africa (Sheed, 184 pp., $7.95). Written by the last United States Ambassador to Uganda, Thomas Melady, and his wife, the book chronicles Amin’s rise to power and describes life in Uganda since his reign. The authors present chilling accounts of bloodshed, arrest, and torture to support their charge that Amin is another Hitler.

Teaching Children as the Spirit Leads (Logos, 315 pp., $4.95 pb) by K. J. Allison claims to be a complete source book for Christian education. It is a thorough study, covering everything from “Spirit-Led Bible Teaching” to “Materials and Books” to a resource section for running a preschool program. Take note: it only considers preschool-age children. For a Catholic perspective on working with youth, see Youth Ministry (Paulist, 212 pp., $2.95 pb), edited by Michael Warren. The book has sixteen practical and foundational essays about evangelization, programs, and the development of leadership. Help! I’ve Got Problems! (Standard, 48 pp. and $1.50 pb each) is more elementary. The five-volume series is designed to help the teacher identify problems in the Sunday school class, and it offers solutions. Each volume deals with a different group from preschool teachers to administrators. Buses, Bibles, and Banana Splits (Baker, $5.95 pb) is a practical book compiled by Bill Wilson. This revised edition offers tried and tested ideas for children’s church and bus programs, including poster/flyer layouts ready for use with only the insertion of the specific information.

A new style for ministry is being pioneered by Nicholas Christoff. He makes his home and gathers a church in an apartment complex of 1,200 persons, most of them single. In Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (Harper & Row, 143 pp., $7.95) Christoff relates his transition from a family to a singles-oriented minister. He describes in a captivating fashion the seven deadly sins and seven lively virtues of singles. He details twenty-one actions that churches can take to remove barriers to singles. An excellent book.

Funeral Services for Today by James Christensen (Revell, 192 pp., $6.95) is a helpful compilation of twenty-eight complete (Scripture, prayers, hymns, meditations) services for all kinds of funerals, including especially difficult ones such as for infants, accident victims, nominal church members, or persons of poor reputation.

William Rodgers, a former actor, focuses on the “‘average’ hom*osexual” in setting forth what he believes is a Christian perspective in The Gay Invasion (Accent, 160 pp., $2.95 pb). He traces the development of thinking concerning hom*osexuality from Freud to the present day. For him hom*osexuality is a sin that requires therapy. However, he cautions that such therapy usually falls short of complete effectiveness. Nevertheless, the grace and mercy of God can enable a hom*osexual to repent of his sin and help him to begin a new life.

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The hymnal is second only to the Bible in importance for the Christian. It is a personal, practical, living resource of Christian theology and experience. In selecting a hymnal, you invest in people; you give to every member of your congregation the means to creatively and corporately worship, witness, and respond.

Selecting the right hymnal for your congregation requires thorough preparation and evaluation. Above all, it requires an open mind if you are to make an objective, fully informed decision.

Many hymnals are inadequately used because they were improperly chosen. The prerequisite to receive the most benefit from the hymnal is to intelligently choose the best one for your people. Therefore, you must know what a hymnal is and what kind will help you accomplish your objective in your ministry. Select the book that comes the closest to your specifications.

It is important to understand the distinction between a hymnal and a song book. A hymnal is an organized selection of materials for congregational use in a variety of services. This organization may be theological, progressing in logical manner from one point to another, e.g. from God to eternal life, or it may be liturgical, following the church year. It should contain hymns from the past and prudently choose new ones.

The hymnal is the primary source of congregational music. If a church desires additional, more specialized materials, it may choose a second book, a song book, to be used along with the hymnals. A song book is usually an informal compilation of selections with an emphasis on gospel songs. It makes no pretense to comprehensiveness or scholarship. Many so-called hymnals are really song books.

Know why you want a new hymnal. Carefully study how you use the one you’ve got. Perhaps current needs are different than when you purchased your present hymnal. Maybe your hymnals are outdated. They may be worn out. Are resources adequate for special times? Is your hymnal inefficient, filled with material that is not usable in your church?

If you had a new hymnal, would you use it more than you do your present one? Would you make changes in the congregational repertoire, or not? Do you know what hymns you would like to add, and what ones you want to retain? Know the tastes of your people. Have specific goals for them. Keep your requirements in mind as you evaluate specific hymnals.

Study hymnal reviews in religious and music periodicals. Notice the advertisem*nts of hymnal publishers. Tell the publisher what you need and request a sample of his most appropriate hymnal. It may not necessarily be his latest. Talk to people who are using the hymnals in which you are interested. Discover what hymnals other churches use. If you are in a denomination, consider the denominational hymnal. However, many denominational churches use some other hymnal. Conversely, a nondenominational church may decide a denominational hymnal best meets its needs. Try to obtain at least three different hymnals to evaluate.

It would be best if the evaluation were done by individuals who not only know hymnody but also understand church ministry. Don’t just look in the index for a few favorite titles. Keep your objectives in mind and concentrate on usable material. Materials you will never use waste space. Here are some points to consider:

1. Distinguish innovation from mere novelty. Innovation is creative and encourages use of the hymnal. Novelty is “gimmickry” and eventually discourages hymnal use.

2. Study the organization of the hymnal. The hymns should be in some logical sequence, making it possible to have a clear overview of the book. Indices should include at least an alphabetical index of titles and first lines, an alphabetical index of tunes, a well-organized topical index, and a table of contents. Metrical indices of texts and tunes and an index of scriptural allusions in the hymns are also helpful.

3. Read all the texts. They should be theologically correct and of good literary quality. They should represent a comprehensive range of doctrines, not merely a few. If stanzas are omitted, the basic concept of the hymn should be intact, with literary continuity and logic retained. There should be a good balance of settings of Scripture, hymns, and experience songs.

4. Sing all the hymns. Be open to new hymns, but be discerning. Consider whether or not your people would want to sing this hymn three years from now. The tunes should be singable. Melodies should be strong or easy to sing, not unimaginative or awkward. Rhythms should not be overly complicated in an attempt to be contemporary. Some tunes should be in lower-than-traditional keys, but this practice should not be carried to excess. An average congregation should be able to sing an E an octave above middle C without difficulty. When a tune is lowered too much, the singing loses brightness and vitality.

5. The hymnal should represent our rich heritage of cultures, historical periods, and musical idioms. You need balance and variety if you are going to maintain freshness and interest over a decade, which is the average life span of a hymnal.

6. Consider the scholarship of the editing. All selections should exhibit musical and literary excellence. Texts and tunes should be historically accurate with sources properly identified. If the editors have refashioned the text in content or language, such changes should be justifiable.

7. Consider the physical qualities of the book. Printing should be clear and easy to read. The fabric and binding must be durable to withstand years of handling. Design and appearance should be attractive. Determine whether or not the size of the book permits comfortable use by both young and elderly people.

Go through this process with each hymnal. Make a chart of your findings so that you can quickly compare features. Obtain facts: Don’t rely on impressions. Make your decision, then hold firm.

Think how the hymnal might be financed. You’ll have a better opportunity of having your recommendation approved if you can suggest a method of funding the purchase. Publishing companies can suggest various financing plans. If an individual wants to donate the hymnals, accept only if you can have the one you really want. The price is too high if you accept something else. A good hymnal is invaluable to your ministry. A poor one will cause difficulties.

Purchase the best binding you can afford. Not only will you get more for your money, because the hymnal will last longer, but a good-looking book enhances the impression your church makes on visitors.

When you get your new hymnal, use it as fully as possible. Explore its resources. Treat it carefully. It will enrich your ministry in the years ahead.—RICHARD D. DINWIDDIE, director, Sacred Music Department, Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, Illinois.

David M. Hazard

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Chuck Girard, singer, composer, and keyboard artist, is mainly responsible for the legacy of music left behind by Love Song, the folk-rock group that revolutionized modern Christian songwriting. Often compared with the Beatles for the quality and influence of its music, Love Song disbanded in 1974, and Chuck started a solo career; he has released three albums so far. Although most of the tunes on Love Song’s two albums, Love Song (1973) and Final Touch (1974), bear his name, Girard’s influence on the group and on the contemporary Christian music scene can only be fully understood in retrospect, and through his solo recordings.

The members of Love Song, all new Christians, met and launched their short, fast-rising career at Calvary Chapel in Southern California in 1970. The songs weave powerful melodies with sensitively balanced keyboard, guitar, percussion, and background vocals—the style of the Beatles that is imitated primarily by groups from the East and the Midwest. Rarely does the California sound associated with the Beach Boys show itself; “Don’t You Know” is an exception. Chuck’s rambling yet controlled combination of piano and solo voice was already cropping up in songs like “Little Pilgrim.” And they balanced biblical truths and experiences of young people, the blend of which has seldom been surpassed in Christian music. Scripture references were printed on the record sleeves next to the lyrics of each song.

Although Love Song was similar in style to the Beatles, the career and break-up of the group stands as a strong witness of the members’ commitment to Jesus Christ. They felt that God wanted them to press on. They pursued separate careers, devoted time to establishing families, and sought spiritual growth and fellowship. No lawsuits followed the split, as with the Beatles, and they still occasionally work together.

Love Song had a reunion tour of the country in early 1976, which resulted in a live album. The group is in a God-ordained “dormancy,” rather than permanently separated.

Chuck Girard is the one who is most involved in expressing his Christian faith through recordings. Chuck’s songs are closely tied to his Christian and artistic growth. His three albums, Chuck Girard (1975), Glow in the Dark (1976), and Written on the Wind (1977), reveal, almost transparently, his daily spiritual walk and his musical experimentation. To listen is to know him.

Chuck’s first two albums combine his usual captivating melodies with a variety of subtle, powerful rhythms. He has the backing of respected artists from the secular music scene: Jim Keltner and Jim Gordon on drums, Leland Sklar and Klaus Voorman on bass, and the group Ambrosia, on whose albums Chuck appears.

In Chuck Girard “Rock ’n Roll Preacher” is a high-paced, high-pitched, and somewhat quizzical song reminiscent of the more hard-driving Love Song arrangements. Girard jokes about the ironic direction of his life—a would-be rock star from the drug culture turned Gospel messenger to the youth of today. His assertion that he “still loves rock ’n roll music,” is a plea for other Christians to recognize that it can present the Gospel to young people. “You Ask Me Why” describes the emptiness of men and women in a rapidly decaying world, and it provides a bridge for Girard to invite them to view his changed life. Through the expansive melody and rhythmically insistent refrain of “Evermore,” he exults that God will “never let me go again.” “Quiet Hour” reveals the intimate joy Girard finds with God, a recurring theme. Soft vocals rest on acoustic guitars to bring out the calm, yet energetic nature of his devotion. He offers the same peace to anyone who has “lost their way” in the haunting, open harmonies of “Everybody Knows for Sure.”

Glow in the Dark is aimed at Christians. Opening with the multi-track voice of Girard in tight harmony on “Anthem,” we hear the theme of the album in “Callin’ You,” “Return,” “When I Was Ready to Listen,” and “No, You’re Not Afraid.” These songs beckon Christians to a closer walk with God, lightly jest at some self-righteous habits, and characterize the firm but gentle work of the Holy Spirit.

The second side of the album experiments with musical forms previously untried by Girard. “Somethin’ Supernatural” pulls no punches, either in describing a Christian through a non-Christian persona, or in its heavy, pulsating musical background akin to the best early works of secular artist Sly Stone. Girard uses the same persona technique in “I Remember.” “Supernatural” and “Old Dan Cotton” venture into blues and ballad styles. “So Thankful,” the best song on the album, was written before an Easter sunrise service. It captures the sad, rejoicing mood of the season. “So Thankful” anticipates his most recent album, with its quiet melancholy and often unrhymed lyrics.

Written on the Wind has fewer backup artists, which suits the more contemplative mood of the album. He experiments with harpsichord, synthesizer, electric piano, and a violin duet to express a range of emotions. The loneliness of a Christian facing a nonsympathetic world in “Fool for Jesus” seems to be an autobiographical account of Girard’s involvement in the recording industry. “Peace in the Valley” and its sister song “Hear the Angels Sing” provide a respite from the more somber songs.

Former themes are prominent in “Plain Ol’ Joe,” and “Harvest Time”; they poignantly remind us of the importance of each person. “Mary’s Song” and “The Warrior” depart from his former style. An almost listless melody conveys the heartbroken resolve that Mary may have felt in accepting Jesus’ ministry and death. “The Warrior” is the most dramatic song produced by Chuck Girard. He alternates wailing with subdued vocals to symbolize the crucifixion. The tension in the album becomes the major difference between it and his earlier works. It is resolved with the final chords of the last song.

Chuck Girard sings about experiences that few Christian musicians have touched. He relates Scripture to his life, and he provides fresh insights for modern men and women. Christian music is trying to confront life without platitudes. Chuck Girard comes to the fore in meeting that challenge.

David M. Hazard works in the public relations department of the 700 Club, Virginia Beach, Virginia.

The Questions Of the Holocaust

The NBC mini-series “Holocaust” is a troubling presentation in many ways. For evangelicals it brings up an issue that is difficult to explain to our Jewish friends. At the particular screening I attended I seemed to be one of the few goyim present. My table companion after the screening was Jewish writer/historian, S. I. Shneiderman. I tried to point out that nominal membership in a state church did not really certify that a Nazi was a Christian.

He rared back, arched his eyebrows, hunched his shoulders, and gesticulated wildly while exclaiming, “Of course they were Christians! And you know it was only the Roman Catholics who protested. The Protestants preached sermons defending the state’s treatment of Jews.”

Round one lost.

The series raises a number of other questions: Is it valid to mingle fiction and history?; Does this drama represent the present day Jewish outlook?; Is it fair to the church?; Can continuing the television tradition of violence be justified even in a good cause?; Does the presentation offer any ultimate answers that might help prevent the future from repeating the immoralities of the past?

One of the reasons the presentation raises the questions so acutely is the fact that it is of such a high quality.

The acting is well above the level of the usual television fare. Fritz Weaver as Dr. Weiss is the family doctor everyone would like to have—gentle, humane, loving. His wife Berta played by Rosemary Harris is the quintessential upper class, aristocratic German hausfrau. And special note has to be taken of the performance of Meryl Streep (that can’t be a stage name) who moves easily from being an elegant young woman to being the high-spirited girl next door. The rest of the cast achieves a generally high level of professional excellence. Obviously a great deal of time and expense went into the settings and staging of the series. All of this gives the dramatization a believability and level of audience identification lacking in less ambitious and professional efforts.

I asked my table companion if he felt that the mingling of history and fiction weakened or strengthened the presentation.

“Oh, definitely weakened it!” he responded without hesitation. “There’s too much solid material for a totally factual documentary without having to make it a historical soap opera.”

And who am I to argue with a historian? I think his point is well taken and it focuses on one of the problems of the new genre of fictionalized history. Historical fiction has been around a long time but that’s different from the current technique of fictionalizing history. Historical fiction normally takes the known events of history and fills in the unknowns of dialogue, motive, and subcharacters. It does so for the purpose of showing something about human nature by placing the characters against an unfamiliar backdrop, or for the purpose of giving the reader some feeling for the ethos of a different time.

Knowing Who We Are

Several other new books reflect increasing interest in the evangelical movement. The most critical one is Fundamentalism (Westminster, 379 pp., $7.95 pb) by James Barr, a British professor of Bible. The book was released in the United Kingdom last year and we plan to publish a three-part discussion of it by Carl F. H. Henry, which will start next issue. We will also have a long review of it by a younger scholar, William Wells. Despite the title, the book is chiefly about evangelicals who Quebedeaux would classify as center or left.

In our April 21 issue we printed an article from Evangelical Roots, a collection of seventeen essays edited by Kenneth Kantzer (Nelson, 240 pp., $8.95). Like Barr’s book, this collection focuses primarily on the distinctive evangelical attitude to the Bible. In Common Roots: A Call to Evangelical Maturity (Zondervan, 256 pp., $8.95), Robert Webber of Wheaton College calls his fellow evangelicals to a greater appreciation of the subapostolic church. Another Wheaton Bible professor, Morris Inch, gives an overview of the movement in The Evangelical Challenge (Westminster, 144 pp., $5.45 pb). Nathan Hatch, Mark Noll, and John Woodbridge provide a historical dimension with essays composing The Gospel in America: Themes in the Story of America’s Evangelicals (Zondervan, 260 pp., $9.95). Also look for a major two-volume work of systematics to be released later this year from the prolific Donald Bloesch of Dubuque seminary, Essentials of Evangelical Theology (Harper & Row).

Last year revised editions of two books published a few years earlier appeared in paperback. Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row, 184 pp., $3.95 pb) by Dean Kelley is well known. Sometimes those who approvingly cite his data do not seem to have thought through the implications of some of his explanations. The Evangelicals (Baker, 325 pp., $4.95 pb) is a collection of essays edited by David Wells and John Woodbridge. Most of the chapters are by evangelicals but some are by friendly critics. In the footnotes and in my own bibliographical essay one can find references to most of the available literature.

D.T.

Besides women and drinking, at one or more points we are introduced to the evangelical diversity on: the inerrancy of the Bible and appropriate methods for biblical scholarship; historic confessional differences, such as Calvinism or Lutheranism, and the degree of attachment to them; conformity to comfortable suburban lifestyles, where the center keeps getting accused of worldliness; the practice of sex within (and sometimes without) marriage; political preferences, where we are continually told about the conservative Republicanism of evangelicals, though Jimmy Carter and moderates Mark Hatfield and John Anderson are the most often named evangelical politicians; commitment to charismatic and relational theologies; attraction to traditional liturgical worship, which seems to be called progressive but could as well have been called conservative; evangelistic methodologies; and the intention to stay within (or join) one of the mainstream denominations rather than to be in a consistently evangelical denomination or independent congregation. With respect to the last category, Quebedeaux conveys the impression that the left has or is in process of joining the mainstream to facilitate witness from within. But he gives at least as many examples of those he calls left who are definitely not in the mainstream, and much of what he calls center is in it.

Quebedeaux’s book would have been much better had he confined himself to discussing such issues and the differing and changing stances that evangelicals and their organizations take regarding them. He should have resisted the urge to force people as a whole into simple left or center categories. By doing so Quebedeaux is guilty of promoting what has been called “lump thinking.” (It is not sufficient for Quebedeaux to put occasional qualifiers or exceptions. The overall thrust of the book is what readers remember.) Instead of respectfully and seriously considering what someone has to say about an issue, lump thinking encourages us to watch for a few code words, look for a few identifying practices, then quickly label the person, lumping him or her in with others whom we have so labeled. This penchant for labeling and lumping is repudiated by Paul in First Corinthians 1–4. There is no substantive difference between what Paul censured and our charging “he is far right,” or “she leans left,” while claiming “I follow Christ.”

I do not say that Christians should not be forthright about their differences. Just because Paul was against factionalism within the body of Christ, this did not blunt his drive to rebuke specific ideas or practices that were wrong. In the four chapters in which he lambasts the spirit of sectarianism, he also rebukes the wrong concept of wisdom and power advocated by at least one of the Corinthian factions. Later in the letter he finds fault with a good many other practices and teachings that were going on in Corinth. We should follow Paul’s example. Faults can be identified without factionalism being fostered. But if we engage in wholesale labeling we greatly reduce the possibility of ministering to one another.

The tendency to factionalism is not restricted to those who are more conservative. Those to the left on one or more issues often demonstrate a sectarian haughtiness toward their brothers who defend the former ways.

I suspect that by reading Quebedeaux many center evangelicals might oppose change of any kind for fear of where it might lead. But I would urge everyone to remember that what Quebedeaux says about those on the left (or elsewhere) is not necessarily so. Many of his more provocative statements are undocumented, such as the assertions: that Bethel, Gordon, and Trinity colleges are more liberal than their respective seminaries; that “rumor has it that 70 percent of Wheaton College seniors are breaking the pledge regularly” (p. 93); that “we can assume that the radicals’ methodology will eventually become dominant in left evangelical circles” (p. 124); or that “the governing boards of these colleges are not blind to this situation. They know that many of their faculty sign the required statement of faith tongue in cheek.… What does concern the governing board … is that the infringement of doctrinal standards and rules of conduct remain a local, ‘in-house’ matter. As long as professors do not publish their liberal views in widely circulated popular magazines read by conservative financial backers of these institutions, much can be tolerated” (p. 93). Quebedeaux predicts in his preface that “many evangelicals will not like what I say or the way I say it.” Such conjectural barbs will undoubtedly make his prediction come true.

Other charges and changes are adequately demonstrated, but then the question needs to be asked, is change necessarily wrong? What might loosely be called the center has undergone many changes in the break with the right that began in the forties. Nor has the right been standing still. Older readers can remember when bobbed hair for women was as keen an issue in many a family and church as ordination of women is today. Doctrinally speaking, a staunch Calvinism befitting Westminster seminary was once widespread among evangelicals. This, too, has changed.

The basic question is not whether someone or some organization has changed, but whether the change is for the better or for the worse. The Protestant Reformation was a movement that introduced major changes. Jesus did many things quite differently from the normative Judaism of his day. The problem is not that Quebedeaux says all change is bad, or that any of his readers would say it in so many words. But in practice many readers will resist even minor changes, because they fear major ones are just a little further down the road.

Instead of resisting all change each proposal or development should be considered on its own merits, and in the light of the Word of God as we are guided in our understanding by the Holy Spirit. Virtually every practice and every doctrine of every believer and congregation is the result of change somewhere along the line, since the days of the apostles. Does this mean that truth changes? No. But our perception of the truth is partial and distorted. And effective ways of communicating truth can change with the circ*mstances. Change sometimes means that we are moving away from the truth, as evangelicals think that the mainstream has done, or closer to it, as anyone who makes changes believes that he is doing.

Earlier I asked, “If tens of millions of adults are evangelicals, where is the evidence in American life?” Perhaps there aren’t that many evangelicals. But perhaps evangelicals (however many there are) aren’t more conspicuous in the world because, as Quebedeaux says, we have become too worldly. That is a disturbing possibility. Indeed, if evangelicals of the right, center, and left on any issue would seriously consider the shortcomings and sins of which we accuse each other, we might very well do together what we are not doing separately—attaining to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, speaking the truth in love, growing up in every way into him who is the head, from whom the whole body, when each part is working properly, upbuilds itself in love (Eph. 4:13, 15, 16).

- More fromDonald Tinder

Cheryl Forbes

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Because music in the church is so visible—or audible—and because every person in the pew knows what he or she likes, it is difficult to get a balanced, thorough, and well-planned program going without causing controversy in some comer of the congregation. One person likes gospel music, another likes Buxtehude or Brahms or contemporary cantatas. Some people like loud electronic organ music and other people like loud pipe organ music (it seems to me that organ music is loud any way you look at it).

It’s also difficult to get any degree of professionalism in a church music program, even in larger congregations. People will pay for an organist or music director but they balk at paying other musicians even a minimal honorarium for their services. Yet it costs a great deal of money and dedication to become a good musician. If a musician wants to work in the church the chances of earning even a marginal living are slight. But there are congregations that strive to combine sound theology, musicality, and professionals with amateurs in their music programs, and they do so with a good balance of classical and contemporary music.

Thirty-two-hundred-member Christ Church in Oak Brook, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), has such a music program. It starts at the primary grades and goes through to the adult chancel choir. In all, the church has seven choirs: primary choir for grades one and two; boys choir for grades three to eight; carol choir for grades six to eight; New Life choir for high school and college-age young people; madrigal singers, which is a choir under the auspices of the church open to non-members by audition only; and the chancel choir, made up of volunteers from the congregation plus a few strategically used professional singers. Christ Church also has a brass ensemble and a hand bell choir. Many large city churches with completely professional choirs spend two to three times as much for their music without as sophisticated a program.

The music styles range from Bach and the Baroque to Ralph Vaughan Williams and Randall Thompson in this century to contemporary gospel music. During the formal Sunday morning worship service the musical style tends to be classical; the evening service is less formal and more contemporary. The church recently installed a magnificent new Austin pipe organ, which richly supports the choir and promotes vigorous congregational singing. At its dedication the various stops and unique features of the organ were explained to the congregation—a healthy and welcome effort to educate the church about a pivotal part of its music.

The chancel choir performs several special concerts during the year: Messiah, by Handel, The Elijah, by Mendelssohn, and Amahl and the Night Visitors, by Menotti, for example. The church also sponsors a fine arts festival and this year initiated a concert series, which featured among other people Norma Zimmer and Metropolitan Opera bass Jerome Hines.

Devon Hollingsworth, the church’s fine organist and music director, and dynamic Arthur DeKruyter, the minister, work together to develop unified and biblical worship services. DeKruyter, like Bruce Leafblad in “What Sound Church Music?” in this issue (see p. 18), is concerned with excellence. Hollingsworth understands some of the frustrations that Leafblad mentions—how to please as many people as possible and still be biblical and musical, and how to get more people involved in this important part of the church’s life. Hollingsworth thinks that one of the keys is to strengthen the music program in the early grades. Grade school children will one day become adult choir members. And the more the children get interested in the musical life of the congregation, the more the parents will.

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Bruce H. Leafblad

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Excellence is the key.

Music was God’s idea—a luxurious gift to human beings, which has enriched our life since earliest times. In the Old Testament God melded music and worship, a glorious union still stable today. Of all the religions of the world, Christianity has contributed most to the great music of the world. God takes music in the church seriously. But does anyone else in the church today?

Even the casual observer would conclude that the state of music in American churches is mixed. On the one hand, music is enjoying an unparalleled acceptance. Increasing numbers of young people are entering vocational music ministries. Many prospective ministers of music are seeking a theological as well as a musical education.

Moreover, the sheer quantity of sacred music that is published and recorded each year is staggering. The graded choir program is on the upswing. Instrumental music is rising. New hymnals with greater depth, breadth, and balance are appearing from both the denominational and non-denominational publishing houses (see Minister’s Workshop, p. 40, for a how-to on hymnal selection). Training schools for the performing arts are being developed in many larger churches. The concert series as a means of community outreach is finding a place in the music ministries of many growing churches.

Although certain geographical or ecclesiological pockets in the country may be insulated or isolated from some or even most of these trends, the tremendous growth and vitality of church music today is positive and encouraging. On the other hand, there are many aspects of church music that aren’t quite so encouraging or positive. Much contemporary church music is shaped more by secular values than by theological principles. Commercial interests rather than spiritual objectives motivate much sacred music. Church music is often aimed at satisfying a popular musical taste at the expense of a balanced ministry designed to meet a variety of spiritual needs. Many of the basic (and unbiblical) assumptions and objectives of the entertainment industry are eroding an already thin concept of ministry through music.

Moreover, a nagging tendency towards the trite and the superficial only serves to point up the avoidance and neglect of real substance and depth in much of today’s church music. Quantity substitutes for quality, as mediocrity surges over excellence. Few people in the church take church music seriously enough to think about it biblically and theologically. Music remains a major area of church life to be largely uninformed by biblical theology. That should make evangelicals uneasy.

We must give serious thought to the importance of the music ministry in the church. Almost half of a church service is music. If we are giving that much time to it, we need to use music as thoughtfully and as wisely as possible. If we look at the Bible we discover the real importance of music in the church. God set aside the Levites as priests and musicians. He determined the goals of music, its functions and its songs. Yet four prevalent approaches to church music have no support in Scripture.

The first approach is that which is rooted in musical taste. The goal here is maximum pleasure for a particular audience. The quality of the composition or the theological solidity of the text matters little as long as a majority of the congregation like the way it sounds—a seduction of the ear. When a church chooses music based primarily on certain tastes it is on a weak biblical foundation.

A second popular approach uses music that expresses cultural values and ideals. Here the preservation of the church’s heritage of musical art treasures is paramount. Churches pride themselves on performing nothing but the great music of the church. Although many churches could benefit by upgrading the quality of their music and by honoring the rich heritage in sacred music, the fact remains that Scripture will not allow us to make the primary function of church music an expression of musical-cultural values.

Equally unbiblical is an approach that views music as primarily a form of entertainment, albeit sacred. Churches who use this approach want to divert the congregation from the problems and pressures of life. It is a form of escape from reality—a process that has little or nothing in common with the functions and responsibilities of biblical religion. On the contrary, the church is concerned with helping people face the problems of life. Therefore, music in the church that is primarily sacred entertainment must be carefully scrutinized and challenged. Although there is a place for entertainment, it may not be the church.

Finally, any philosophy that views music as an end in itself—art for art’s sake—is in theological trouble. Everything in the church must have a purpose rooted in something greater than itself.

What, then, is a biblically defensible role of music in the church? The role of music in the church is nothing more than, nothing less than, nothing other than the work of the church: ministry to the Lord; ministry to the body of Christ; and ministry to the world for which Christ died. Our ministry to the Lord has been expressed in worship. Our ministry to the body of Christ has been expressed in fellowship, nurture, and education. And our ministry to the world has been expressed in evangelism, missions, and social ministries.

In music we minister to the Lord through hymns of praise and love. We minister to our fellow believers through songs of instruction, fellowship, and encouragement. We minister to the world through songs of witness and proclamation. In Ephesians 5:19 Paul describes the New Testament practice of music ministry and “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart.” Today’s church must take seriously the need for a biblical perspective on the proper role of music in the church.

Once we understand the biblical perspective, we need to set biblical goals. It is not enough to perform sacred music. Nor is it enough to want to bless people. That kind of generality is as immature as our familiar prayer, “God bless the missionaries.”

In our ministry to the Lord our ultimate goal is to glorify him. The goal of worship is not the delight of man but the pleasure of God. “I will praise the name of God with a song; I will magnify him with thanksgiving. This will please the LORD more than an ox or a bull with horns and hoofs” (Ps. 69:30–31). Thus the ministry of music in worship must be primarily concerned with pleasing and glorifying God. In worship God is the audience.

We have different goals in our ministry to the body of Christ, the ultimate objective being maturity in Christ. Paul summed up the goal of this area of ministry in this way: “for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:12–13). Ministry to the body of Christ through music must be directed toward these same biblical goals.

The other persons-oriented ministry is to the world. Here the objective is to convert people to Christ. And that’s the goal of this area of music.

Pastors and church musicians today must give more attention to the spiritual functions involved in ministry, and how those functions are embodied in texts and expressed through music. It seems elementary to suggest that there is a difference between speaking to God and speaking to man. Yet in many evangelical churches the music used in worship shows that not enough people know it. In worship we speak to God.

Moreover, it is equally important to understand the variety of spiritual functions involved in worship. In the Psalms alone there are dozens of different words and expressions used for worship. And the differences between praise and petition or between thanksgiving and confession are substantial. Music should reflect these aspects of worship.

The same is true for ministry to the church and to the world. In these ministries we address two different groups of people, and the functions involved are different from those involved in worship. When ministering to believers we are concerned with such functions as instruction, exhortation, fellowship, edification, and encouragement. Ministry to unbelievers involves witness, testimony, proclamation, and invitation. For music to fulfill these goals, minister and musician must work together to develop the music program along biblical lines.

The Bible is our message but it also tells us about methods. For example, the biblical principles of stewardship can help a congregation be realistic about its music program. Just because a big church across town has a banjo choir your church need not have one, too. There is a lot of imitation taking place in church music today, much of it unnecessary and unhealthy. The pressure to jump on a particular bandwagon does not always produce good stewardship—or good music, either. The music program of the local church should discover the musical gifts within the congregation, train and refine those gifts, and encourage people to use them within and without the church. That is good stewardship.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to get people involved in the music program. Jesus told his disciples to pray for laborers. Too often prayer is the last thing the minister of music tries. Also,’ the Lord sends the laborers. Jesus never hinted that volunteers be sought to do the work of the Kingdom; volunteerism is not a biblical notion. To choose, to appoint, to call, and to send—that is God’s method. Any music program that circumvents this biblical method will always depend on its own creativity to invent one recruitment gimmick after another to find volunteers.

Church musicians must maintain and develop their spiritual lives by regular and diligent study of God’s Word and by prayer. Individuals who have had an impact on the church and the world have had a deep relationship with God. They constantly grew as Christians. They knew the Bible. Church musicians should emulate these people.

James 3:1 tells us, “Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.” These words must be carefully considered not only by those who teach through words, but also by those who teach through music. Musicians are given highly influential positions and opportunities in the life of the church, not only in services and concerts, but also through recordings and tapes. We need to be reminded that God holds such teachers through music accountable for their lives. This is no small matter; it deserves a great deal of thought in the evangelical music world.

Church musicians must also be open to the influence of people within his congregation. The lone ranger mentality should be resisted. The church does not need a musical star system, whose pattern comes not from Scripture but from Hollywood. Rather, the church needs musical servants.

If we are to have informed, committed musicians, seminaries must lead the way. Earlier I suggested that a reason to think seriously about music in the church lay in the fact that God officially established music in the Old Testament. The accounts in the Chronicles, together with the many songs and song fragments and musical references in both Testaments, plus the material in the canonical hymn book (The Psalms), constitute an extensive body of material that ought to be studied as seriously as the rest of biblical content.

Evangelical seminaries are failing today’s churches here. It is curious if not unreasonable that the seminaries that are committed to the Holy Scriptures and that would fight to defend the authority, the reliability, and the infallibility of those Scriptures, at the same time exclude large portions of biblical content from the purview of their study and teaching.

It is axiomatic that no lasting growth, no spiritual maturity, and no biblical and theological integrity will come to church music without a serious commitment on the part of the seminaries. Pastors need to know how to teach their congregations to speak to God through song as well as through prayer. They need to understand the biblical and theological foundations of the music ministry and its proper place within church life.

Also, there is a desperate need for ministers of music to have the appropriate training in theology to go along with their training in music. Too many church musicians have a limited understanding of, and appreciation for, the true nature and work of the church.

Taking church music seriously demands that we be committed to excellence. There is no justification for mediocrity in church music or in any other ministry of the church. Excellence is a theological term—an attribute of God. Perfection is the supreme expression of qualitative excellence, and God is perfect—perfect in his essential nature (Matt. 5:48), perfect in his work (Deut. 32:4), perfect in his ways (Ps. 18:30), and perfect in his will (Rom. 12:2). In Matthew 5we are commanded to be perfect. This is a goal that, impossible as it seems, must shape the direction of our lives and ministries. He whose name is excellent and who does all things well does not call us to a life of mediocrity in ministry. It is the master’s “well done” that we are to long for and strive after.

In the Old Testament God set up an exacting standard for sacrifices. In the case of animals a perfect specimen was required—one without spot or blemish. In the New Testament era the sacrifices became acts of praise and thanksgiving to God. The forms have changed but the standard is nowhere revised. Thus, God’s expectation for all gifts offered to him is a continuing standard of excellence. According to Romans 12, all of the Christian’s life is to be seen as “a living sacrifice to God.” In the music ministry of the church we must make a definite break with mediocrity and commit ourselves to excellence.

The people of the church must get serious about music—pastors, musicians, theologians, laymen, and Christian educators alike. Making music to the glory of God involves everyone in the church. The imperative to “sing to the Lord” is for all believers. To use music as a tool and to offer music as a gift involves understandings and commitments that are theological and practical, as well as musical.

- More fromBruce H. Leafblad

Cheryl Forbes

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What a hen house can mean.

John Henry Bosworth, late in sixty-eight, decided that the time had come to settle his estate.” Bosworth, better known as Noel Stookey, who is even better known as the Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary, did just that. He shaved off his famous beard, unpacked his suitcase, and hung up his clothes—in his own closet. First-class jets, hotels, strawberries-and-champagne breakfasts, and the isolation of stardom became things of the past. He’d been on the road too long. He no longer knew who Noel Stookey was. And who were his young daughter Elizabeth and his wife Betty? he asked himself. In 1968 he settled his estate and started the greatest adventure of his life, an adventure that instead of taking him forward would in a sense take him back to a little boy he’d left behind in the Midwest.

That someone as well known as Noel Paul Stookey would undertake such an adventure—become a Christian—was unthinkable in the midsixties. Christians were odd men out; Peter, Paul and Mary were definitely in—the best in folk music. They had a soft, close blend that was easy to listen to; their style symbolized the brotherhood that they sang about in “Because All Men Are Brothers.” Their lyrics, many of them written by the poet and folk singer Bob Dylan, had to be listened to. It was the beginning of the protest years of Viet Nam and civil rights. Students were moving from a lackadaisical attitude toward life to an aggressive shoulder-shaking position. PP&M music affected that generation; the group became a highly visible symbol of young, earnest politics of the left. (And not just in secular universities. They sowed some of the seeds for a strong though small movement on Christian campuses for Eugene McCarthy first and later for George McGovern.) That was in the midsixties.

And then the next wave hit. But this time, instead of dying in Viet Nam or slugging it out on the streets of Chicago, young people were gathering at the beach, arms outstretched, to tell the world that their sins had been washed away and that “born again” was more than a cliché used by Baptist ministers and television evangelists. It meant something new and fresh. The wave had hit the shore for the last time, and as the tide receded, scum and seaweed were washed away, leaving salt-cleansed souls.

Standing on shore at high tide in 1968 was Noel Paul Stookey. Before the news media picked up the fact that there was a new movement for Jesus Stookey was part of it. His fans wondered why the group disbanded, why Stookey shaved his beard. One of the strongest influences on young people—after concerts Stookey and his partners always attracted a crowd of kids who wanted advice—dropped out of sight almost overnight. And then Warner Brothers released his first solo album, Paul And. What kind of music was that? He talked about Jesus in a personal way and about his family and what he wanted out of life. What had happened?

In 1967 Noel had visited his old friend from Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan. For some reason Dylan had stopped writing protest songs and had begun writing what Stookey calls subjective music, or songs of introspection. Such songs as “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowland” made Stookey wonder if Dylan knew more about life than he did. Even though Dylan was recovering from a motorcycle accident, Stookey went to visit him in Woodstock, New York, looking for help.

Dylan used the typical psychologist’s approach: He got Stookey to talk about his problems. Two things stood out for the troubled singer. Dylan told him that the next time Stookey gave a concert in the Midwest—where he was raised—he should go for a long walk in the country. Although it seems an obvious suggestion, at the time Stookey thought it was irrelevant. However, since Dylan had suggested it, he decided he would try it. When he did, he understood what Dylan had in mind. The walk enabled Stookey to think about his priorities.

Looking back on the conversation, Stookey wonders how he for years had overlooked Dylan’s second piece of advice: Read the Bible. He was looking for truth; he’d been disturbed for several years by the hypocrisy in his life. He’d read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Edgar Cayce—signs that he was searching for God, though he wouldn’t have said it at the time. Spirituals and old gospel tunes were a part of the PP&M repertoire. But Stookey had never opened a Bible, never read “the guidebook.” Dylan changed that.

Stookey started reading the Bible when he had time on tour—which, he admits, wasn’t all that often. But he managed to read sections of the Old Testament and all of the New. As an outsider looking in, he found the window at times a little foggy. He didn’t understand the book of Revelation, but after Cayce and the Book of the Dead he was fascinated by the apparent mysticism and obscure symbols. Some of Dylan’s more difficult lyrics seemed to have come from Revelation. And its imagery fits in with songs like “Well, Well, Well” and “When the Ship Comes In,” both of which talk about the last days.

Some other parts of the New Testament, though equally unclear to Stookey, held less interest for him. Like the parable of the ten virgins. Only a Christian, he thinks, can understand that story. “What did that mean to me?” Stookey asks. “I thought that God was all-loving. You don’t understand the urgency or even how you’re skirting disaster for so long. So a parable about virgins who don’t have enough oil, can’t borrow it, and are too late to get in when they find the oil means nothing on the face of what you hope to be an all-loving God.”

Of course, there were things in the Bible that Stookey understood, such as the Beatitudes and other parts of the Sermon on the Mount. He had come to recognize that there was such a thing as absolute truth. He knew that the Bible had it, but he didn’t know what to do with it. What did telling the truth mean? Now Stookey believes that truth is not the end of the rainbow but a means whereby you perceive clearly. In terms of relationships, truth means that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. At the time he knew that he didn’t tell the truth. He’d long been living a lie. His image mattered most. Somewhere along his career he had stopped wondering if that image were real.

That’s what got him started on his journey. A few years before he visited Dylan he began to sense that his real self was not the Paul Stookey everyone saw, that he was in a sense a divided personality. He felt removed from reality. “I had built this apparatus that had the face of Noel, whose arms and legs moved and went through all the right motions, but somewhere inside of me there was a little boy who wanted to be closer to what it was that made him happy. And he wasn’t finding it with this image.”

The Stookey image was self-assured. Famous. Prestigious. He comforted himself with the words, “You’ve made it.” Millions of people knew his voice, his skill as a guitarist, his wit. But his image could have no flaws, never commit a faux pas. Stookey had lots of taste, and people with taste dressed a certain way (three-piece suits, for example), ate certain things (shirred eggs and chicken livers, champagne and strawberries), and smoked expensive cigars (which Stookey smoked even though he could barely tolerate their taste). The image counted most; the little boy inside suffered stoically. Stookey was not yet ready to admit that his life had turned down the wrong road. He, the image, was traveling deeper into the city. The small child longed to head for the country.

As the dichotomy between how he lived and how he wanted to live became uppermost in his mind, he stopped singing and started mouthing his music. “I had begun to see that there was a difference between what I was singing and what I was living. And I liked what I was singing. I felt closer to that in my heart than I did to what I was doing. Yet there was this whole opportunity to be this other way.”

PP&M had reached a crossover point. From 1960 to 1965 the trio had sung straightforward folk music and social commentary like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A’ Changing,” battle-cry music of the young left. Then their music began to move into more complex instrumental arrangements with less and less simple guitar. The mood seemed more anxious. For Stookey the change in sound went along with the changes in his thinking.

Noel didn’t discuss these things with Peter and Mary, as close as they were. The pull of the rich and privileged way of life was too strong. “I felt as if my life were straight out of the amusem*nt park scene in Pinocchio. The island that Pinocchio found. So alluring. I traveled first class. I had limos waiting for me at the airport. I was protected. Those things break down the human contact that you have under normal circ*mstances. It’s very strange to be in the marketplace with yourself, rather than with a product. The product becomes you. And if someone says, ‘You’re so genuine,’ it becomes: Step right up and get your genuineness.” In the long run that course is detrimental; you lose touch with reality and you only play at being genuine. Stookey sees the task of taking out the garbage as a symbol of the reality he has found. “When I lived in Westchester I hired someone to do that for me. Now I go to the dump myself.”

At the distance of ten or twelve years Stookey sees a papier-mâché person, very tastefully and expensively decked out on the surface but hollow and held together by thin glue. He also sees Max Factor Number Two pancake makeup, dripping-wet shirts, a body that was too thin—underfed physically and spiritually. He remembers a growing desire to avoid adulation: Why should he take credit for something he had had nothing to do with? Yet if his talents weren’t his, whose were they?

As his uneasiness about the life he was leading increased, he learned to rationalize with greater sophistication. “I assumed that dissatisfaction was part and parcel of the human dilemma. I wasn’t looking for an answer to it. But it was the bur under the saddle that got me going.” The three years 1965–68 were quietly frantic for Stookey. He knew he was older; he also knew he was no wiser, and he didn’t like that. He was hiding another person beneath the outer crust. The only time that person came out was in the lyrics Stookey wrote. “Most everything I’ve gone through is reflected in what I’ve written. In the creation of music I could express innermost secrets. The small boy could talk all the time and it would be acceptable. Or if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter since it was just a song.”

Before Stookey went to talk to Dylan he had made a few theological decisions, none of which comforted him at all. He believed in an abstract God, one who was inactive. The idea of knowing God personally had never occurred to him. Yet so much of his happiness, or what he thought of as happiness, had been given to him, seemingly by chance or by a benevolence of creation. That was hard to reconcile with an inactive God. It made him feel lonelier than ever.

Even reading the Bible helped very little. He saw what his life should be like but was powerless to change it. The music he sang and listened to, as well as the Bible passages he read, told him that “before we attempt to take the splinter out of our brother’s eye we had best take care of the two-by-four in our own.” That was easier to say than to do. He felt as if he were trying to change all the colors on the outside of his life when what he needed was a new picture tube. Finally he decided that all you could do in life was to make the best of it, to take what you’d been given and try to make it better.

Reading Scripture, though, is never a fruitless pursuit. It prepared Stookey for God’s messengers. The first was disc jockey Scott Ross, who in 1967 served as Stookey’s personal John the Baptist. Although he couldn’t understand what Ross was saying, Stookey recognized that Ross knew God in a way he didn’t.

A year later at a concert, a young man about ten years younger than Stookey, who was then thirty, asked if he could talk with him. Stookey, who thought he looked a little depressed, said sure, after the show. When the concert ended he looked for the boy and asked what he wanted to talk to him about. The boy replied, “I want to talk to you about the Lord.” As Stookey describes it, “An adrenalin change took place and my heart just started beating fast and I felt like this was it—whatever it was. I didn’t know where it was going to lead. But I don’t think I would have felt that way unless what he was saying was true. He told me how he had been converted. And he said that God had put a burden on his heart to talk with me. That put God in an active sense. I had never thought of that before.”

The two of them went off to Stookey’s hotel room. Although they rode over in a pick-up truck driven by a third person, Stookey doesn’t remember seeing or talking to anyone else. He asked the boy if he believed in reincarnation. The boy replied that there were more important things to talk about. “That was the heaviest thing I had metaphysicked into, but something inside me said ‘he knows more than you do and what he knows you should know’.” When they reached the hotel, Stookey tried to be a good host, but the boy wanted to pray. As the young Christian prayed, Stookey learned that not only had he somehow avoided the guards to get backstage but he had had no ticket to the concert. After thanking God for his help, the boy said, “Now I think Paul wants to talk to you.” All Noel could say was, “I’m sorry.” “I started crying,” he says. “Later I realized what I was saying I was sorry for, which was for not thinking that God was alive, and for all those ways in which I had used things to get between me and people.”

Stookey believes that God loves a contrite spirit, and that night he had finally reached a state of contrition. He was sorry that he had abused other people and himself. He confessed things that he had done wrong, though he didn’t itemize them. “I was washed, cleansed—I couldn’t believe it. It was like I had this incredibly cantilevered balance. Or that I was two interwoven mobiles. Suddenly when I had admitted that I was sorry for the life I had led without God, everything collapsed and I was perfectly balanced. I had been given day one again.”

Slowly Stookey’s life began to change. Prayer became vital for him. While he was on tour he prayed continually. Right away the Bible was different for him. And he met lots of Christians. As he traveled from town to town he would always run into groups of believers. He didn’t know how it happened, and he didn’t ask. He just accepted it as part of God’s providence. People who were dismayed by the conversion offered obstacles, like the Crusades, to his faith. Quickly he discovered that the only thing he could defend was his own experience with God.

As Stookey viewed his life with new eyes he saw his family as if for the first time. He’d been on the road feeding his ego in the name of social justice, away from his family four days out of seven. “It’s not possible to have any kind of relationship under those circ*mstances,” he says. “If you’re building a building, you don’t leave large gaps between the supports.” His new commitment to Christ meant he had a new commitment to his family also. He thought that the reality of his conversion would best be evidenced by the strength of his family life.

He told Peter and Mary that he wouldn’t tour anymore. Invitations to give his Christian testimony at crusades and churches began pouring in, and his wife expected him to exchange one kind of touring for another. But he turned down those invitations, too. Today he does about twenty concerts a year, and his wife helps him decide which invitations to accept. He works across the street from his home and spends his weekends solely with his family.

Stookey wanted to give his children the kind of childhood he had had in Maryland, where he lived before he moved to the Midwest, and for himself he wanted the solitude he didn’t have in the suburbs of New York. He needed silence to study the Word and space to grow up. So he looked for a place to land and found South Blue Hill, Maine. In winter the area has about 1,500 residents, in summer twice that many.

The coast of Maine is a stand-offish country, particularly in the winter as it shrugs its rugged mountains, dropping snow and rain on the ground below. There is little to do there if you aren’t a fisherman or lumberjack or don’t bring work with you. The country’s forbidding manners and brusque exterior could discourage the fainthearted. But Maine also holds its people close, protecting them by ocean and mountain. It offers solitude—the silence of a foggy morning is crisp and crystalline, certainly the right atmosphere for thinking. And its beauty is a constant reminder of the nature of God, creator and sustainer of the universe. The struggle to survive makes depending on the providence of God a way of life.

Driving along a coastal road, Stookey and his wife saw an abandoned four-story hen house. They bought it, along with twenty-seven acres of land and, eventually, a house across the street. He and his family have been there a little over three years. The hen house sits on a slight rise overlooking the bay just at the place where it opens to greet the Atlantic Ocean. Because the hen house was too large to heat or maintain, Stookey shortened it and recycled the wood to build a solar-heated addition on to his home. In that shortened coop on the almost finished third floor, Stookey put in a recording studio called Eight Track Recording studio. Right now it serves as the center for his work as a Christian musician.

When Stookey decided that his Christian commitment meant setting his family life in order, he wondered how else his faith would manifest itself. Was straightforward evangelism the only means of expressing it? Or can every act of a Christian be evangelistic, whether it’s changing a tire for someone in distress or writing a song? He concluded that evangelism was not something that came only from the pulpit and that it did not necessarily entail an overt presentation. “Love thy neighbor” was a concept that, put into practice, could show on a nonverbal level why Christ came to earth.

Those attitudes reinforced his conviction that he belonged in a community like South Blue Hill. He attends the local Congregational church, affectionately known as the Congo, and sings in the choir. He takes meals to elderly people who need help. And he records and produces albums that present a Christian witness. No matter what a song is about, Stookey mentions the anchor that he found in Christ. He thinks that his music affects non-Christian young people the way the Bible affected him before his conversion: interesting, compelling, pointing to something beyond what they now know.

His few concerts bear that out. Some of them are on secular campuses, such as the University of Maine, and others are at Christian colleges, such as Wheaton and Houghton. The song lyrics advise the listeners to “turn it over to the Father” or explain that “the building block that was rejected became the cornerstone of a whole new world.” Yet he doesn’t think of his concerts as overtly evangelistic. He rarely gives a spoken testimony. “I feel that the testimony is in song. Some of my songs are better received than others. For instance, I think ‘Miracles’ is a very heady kind of tune intellectually. It pinpoints an understanding of coincidence. You can isolate the means of a miracle, you can describe the ways in which a miracle was done, but that never detracts from the miracle. Before I was a Christian I performed to entertain and be entertained. I derived a lot of satisfaction out of performing. I still do. But now the satisfaction is similar to that you get from doing a favor or a kindness for someone. I feel that I’m of service to the people in my audience. I feel that I am of use to somebody out there, either intellectually or because I’m touching an area that they’ve thought about. Or maybe I have attacked directly a problem that they have been up against, and they need to know that somebody else has had that same problem and overcome it.”

Stookey’s work at the studio has branched out. He has done some work for Maine’s public broadcasting network. A videotape of one of his concerts was recently a part of the network’s annual fund-raising drive. He has written some music for public television. And he did a children’s radio program, “Sandman.” He has plans to work with a local high school to develop a course in radio broadcasting. He offers the resources of his recording studio at a rate that most struggling young musicians can afford.

Peter, Paul and Mary sang some children’s songs, the most famous being “Puff, the Magic Dragon” (which, contrary to rumors, is not about marijuana). Now Stookey is much more interested in children’s music and programming. After all, he says, when a person accepts Christ he becomes a child.

Although he thinks the word “vision” is far too presumptuous, he has one for the hen house, which relates to his interest in children’s programming. On the second floor he and his small staff are building an animation studio. “If it weren’t for Christianity I would not have an interest in animation.” One evening away from home with nothing to do he got the idea of expressing abstract ideas through animation. He is pursuing that now. The animation group is working on a cartoon to use as a calling card, an abstract interpretation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

Stookey thinks you can teach a lot of morality by using abstract cartoons. You could show the weight of lying, for example, or show how deadly sin is to the personality. You could demonstrate what happens when someone deviates from certain basic principles: life becomes crooked and complicated. With a return to the principle that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (i.e., truth), life straightens out. People could enjoy and understand such cartoons without the distractions of character, Stookey thinks. They would see sin as sin without attaching it to a person.

As with his concerts and record albums, so with his animation work. Stookey is looking to serve people. “My outlook on life is positive,” he says. “I want it to be of service as it unfolds.” He stresses that he has an unfinished life. He has been a Christian for about ten years. That commitment has taken him to Maine and to an unfinished hen house. His life as a Christian is like that hen house: one floor nearly finished, work being done on the others, purpose unfolding.

- More fromCheryl Forbes

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Christians who viewed “Holocaust” on television April 16–19 had a vivid reminder of the depravity of man. There are numerous important questions raised by the systematic murder of six million Jewish civilians as well as many non-Jews by German forces during World War II. A reflective reading or rereading of the article by Helmut Thielicke, “Why the Holocaust,” together with the response to it by three American evangelicals in our January 27 issue (p. 8 and p. 14), is highly recommended.

A question that needs to be earnestly asked is, What should we be doing now to prevent such atrocities? Or, if they cannot be totally prevented, in view of the evil that is in man, what should we be doing to ameliorate them? At the very least, what can Christians be doing to avoid as much participation as they can in mass slavery and torture and murder? This is no hypothetical question, for violent atrocities in Uganda, Cambodia, and many other places are going on even now. And the cruelty of treating whole ethnic groups as inferior, a necessary prelude to the kind of “final solution” that the Nazis attempted, is globally pervasive.

It is fitting to evaluate the television series as an artistic presentation of one of the more horrible deeds of recorded history (see Refiner’s Fire, p. 36). One can also study from countless sources and perspectives what can be known of the event itself. But one dare not stop with aesthetic and historical evaluations. What can be learned from the Holocaust that something like it may happen, in the words of militant Jews, “never again”?

Ironically, those who so wish to magnify the horrors of the Holocaust that they stress its uniqueness are saying, in effect, that we can learn nothing from it. We can learn about it, but to learn from it requires that new situations occur where we can use our knowledge. Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and professor of humanities at Boston University, strongly criticized NBC’s “Holocaust.” It “is an insult to those who perished and to those who survived.” He faults the production on every count, but he especially objects to it because “this series treats the Holocaust as if it were just another event.” But he asserts that “the Holocaust is unique, not just another event … it tries to show what cannot be imagined.” Wiesel’s opinion should be considered and rejected.

Those who make of the Holocaust an event without precedent or successor, who raise it to the level of apocalypse, have their counterparts among Christian theologians who denounce any portrayal of Christ. If the kind of suffering in the Holocaust is unrepeatable, so are the kind of persons who inflicted the suffering. Indeed, there are many who, unable or unwilling to admit the depravity of man, want to blame Nazism on some mad mutation of the human species that cannot be repeated. They argue that the Nazis should be forgotten, not portrayed. Curiously, Wiesel does say that “the Holocaust must be remembered,” but he doesn’t know how. “How is one to tell a tale that cannot be—but must be—told?” Of course there is room for improvement, but I think that all of those involved with the NBC series are to be highly commended. A Chicago Sun-Times television critic, Frank Swertlow, called it “simply … the finest TV show that I have seen, surpassing even ‘Roots’”

One of the strongest points of “Holocaust” is that it depicted the Nazis as sane humans, not as insane beasts. It is irresponsible to routinely call Hitler and others involved in heinous crimes madmen. If they are mad, then they have no guilt. If we say they are beasts, we say that humans cannot do such evil. But they can. It was reported that two actors turned down roles in “Holocaust” because it depicted the Nazis too favorably. But that is precisely its strength; the crimes of the Nazis are so undeniable that they cannot be rationally denied. What people do deny is that rational humans can be so wicked.

“Holocaust” was also great because it enables us to identify with a particular family, the Weisses. Of course they are fictional, and presumably no one family was in as many different places as they were. But the human mind is not adapted to understanding mass horror; the death of one whom we have come to know grieves most of us far more than the deaths of hundreds, even millions of strangers. The Weisses were plausible and a composite of what innumerable families did experience in part. If we had relied solely on incidents and dialogue that could be rigorously documented we would have, paradoxically, a more unrealistic presentation. Those who fault “Holocaust” as a blend of fact and fiction imply that the fictional part is akin to the purely imaginary Close Encounters of the Third Kind or King Kong. They also imply that there can be purely factual accounts. The truth is that even the most cautious historian must make judgments about the sources that he uses, sources that are always incomplete and often misleading, intentionally or unintentionally.

The question is not whether it is proper to blend documentable fact with controlled imagination, for this is always done. The question is whether it is done well or poorly, responsibly or irresponsibly. “Holocaust,” in my judgment, has done this very well. As a result, those who watched it are confronted more forcibly than before with the crucial question, What should we be doing now to prevent such atrocities?—D.T.

A Call For Stewardship

Every public figure should expect to stand under the spotlight. A free and inquisitive media is one of the best safeguards for religious and political freedom. Irresponsible charges, however, serve neither freedom nor the public welfare.

Recent talk shows have featured an author promoting his new novel in which the chief character is an evangelist—obviously modeled on Billy Graham. In the book and on the talk show the author makes wild charges and ridiculous innuendoes.

Graham has never publicly commented on the threats and charges made against him from various sections of the theological, political, social, and mental health communities. But sometimes his friends feel that they should do so, lest his own silence appear to be an admission of guilt. Daily reports of political corruption made many people more willing to believe charges that they earlier would have ignored.

In this most recent example, Graham’s defamer, posing as an outraged defender of justice, accuses Graham and his evangelistic team (along with most other evangelists who teach that “you must be born again”) of withholding public revelation of finances and of “laundering” gifts so that they can stash away huge sums in Swiss bank accounts and spend on themselves hundreds of millions of dollars received from poor innocent Christians (“suckers”), who meant their hard-earned pittances “to go to Jesus.” We don’t want to pay undue attention to reckless charges, but here are a few things to keep in mind.

We are all sinners, evangelists included. They make mistakes, errors of judgment, and commit outright sins. All men, except Jesus Christ, have done likewise. And it should not be forgotten that even Christ was criticized.

Not all evangelists are honest. Some who have proclaimed the Gospel have for a variety of reasons not lived up to the standards that are found in Scripture. They have fleeced the sheep of God’s flock to warm their own pockets. But the great majority of evangelists and Christian leaders are basically honest. It is wrong to cast aspersions on all evangelists because of wrongdoing on the part of a few unrepresentative rascals. Since some “Christian” organizations may be basically dishonest, Christians should be reasonably sure that the person or organization to which they donate funds is aboveboard. This is responsible stewardship. It should be added that honesty alone is not an adequate criteria for approving a ministry. Funds may be poorly managed, personnel inadequately matched to the task at hand; even the aim of the ministry, however well-intentioned, may not be an appropriate goal in which to invest funds.

In the case of Billy Graham, even those who disapprove of much of what he says and does, reckon him as personally honest. Those who know him vouch for him as a man of immense integrity. The board of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association comprises men and women with widely recognized credentials for integrity, for financial acumen, and for deep commitment to evangelical Christianity and to the missionary and evangelistic goals of Graham and his association. The conservative evangelical public recognizes that its interests are ably protected by these outstanding public servants. This board exercises complete control of all the funds received either by the Graham organization or by Billy Graham personally. The books and accounts of the BGEA are audited regularly according to standardized procedures by a respected and nationally known auditing firm and reports are supplied to all board members.

The advisability of detailed public disclosure of audited accounts is more complex than it might at first appear. The Billy Graham Association, however, will provide a complete audited statement to anyone who requests it. It is our opinion that all Christian organizations should follow this policy. No evangelist or charitable organization goes to greater lengths than does the BGEA to keep its records straight, to provide for rigorous auditing, and to make the results known not only to a board of trusted representatives of the Christian public who vouch for the integrity of the association’s finances, but now also to the general public.

On good grounds Christians have come to trust Billy Graham and the many ministries associated with him. Contrary to what some may be charging or suggesting by innuendo, those who have given money to Billy Graham over the years can rest assured that their funds have been used exclusively for the advancement of evangelical causes with which they themselves identify and which they choose to support.

A New Chance to Open the Church

Mobility is a fact of life in the United States. Real estate salesmen know it and thrive on it. Moving companies profit from it. Financial institutions, as conservative as they are, have accommodated themselves to it. Even tax collectors seem to keep up with moving Americans.

The church, however, has lagged behind. Too many congregations act as though all their members live on farms. Not only do they show little concern for helping their departing members establish church connections in their new locations, but the average congregation makes little effort to help newcomers feel at home. Churches seem unaware of the evangelistic opportunities presented by the changing population.

A bright spot is the attention that has been given to the opportunities in America’s “sun belt.” More and more people are moving South and West and the church should be the first to greet them.

Few people know that many black people are moving back to the South (see the census bureau report, Geographical Mobility: March 1975 to March 1977). The researchers carefully point out that complete data will not be available until the 1980 census is studied. But in the two-year period of the new study, 184,000 blacks two years old and over moved into southern states; 165,000 moved out.

What about these “sun belt” newcomers? Many of them are probably returning home, but that won’t be known until after the next complete decennial census. Even if that’s the case, the communities are different than when the people left. Many of the people will have changed as well. What kind of welcome are these people getting? Is the church ready for them?

The migration of blacks to the South offers a unique opportunity to the church there. Many of the newcomers are educated young people who have not experienced that “old time religion” known by their grandparents. What the church does now may well be more important than what it did or didn’t do in the tumultous fifties and sixties. The church should not only open its doors, but it should send people out to bring them in, one by one.

Decent Speech On the Airwaves

Radio and television had not been invented, of course, when the United States Constitution was drafted 190 years ago. The federal government is involved in the regulation of broadcasting, however, and this government activity is often justified under the Constitution’s catch-all “general welfare” clause. Whether one accepts the broad application of this clause or not, it is instructive to explore its relevance in a current case.

Does America’s present broadcasting fare promote the country’s general welfare? If it does not, then shouldn’t the government do something about it? Radio and television have a powerful role in U.S. society today. In many instances broadcasting media have all but replaced family, school, town meeting, and even church. Washington Post writer William Greider in a recent series observed, “The only place where all America meets is in front of the television set.” Every evening, he wrote, America gathers before the tube. Much of the country is also there at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Historically, the federal government has concentrated on regulating the technical aspects of broadcasting. The assignment of frequencies, the location of transmitters, the quality of signals, and other such matters have been closely monitored. The whole area of programming has been handled more gingerly since the question of free speech and free press was involved. The Federal Communications Commission recently has been saying more about programming, however. Some individual commissioners have been outspoken and have used public opinion as much as legal authority to push for programming changes.

There was a time when the FCC’s authority over one area of program content was unchallenged, but now even that is gone. Indecent, profane, or obscene language was not allowed, and any station that permitted it ran the risk of losing its license. Recent Supreme Court decisions have undercut FCC authority in this area, though, and now the commission is in court over its power to prohibit such language. We commend the commission for standing up to those who would sneer at the principle of decency on the air. If ever there was a case where a government agency could “promote the general welfare,” it is this one—the Federal Communications Commission vs. Pacifica Foundation.

The United States Catholic Conference, in its friend-of-the-court brief, put it well: “It is clear that the public interest is paramount.… In the light of this interest, we submit that the statute in question and the regulatory activity undertaken in compliance with that statute are reasonably calculated to advance this public interest.”

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‘Where Are the Mainline Funnies?’

A friend of mine, a state university professor, recently suggested that the impact of our evangelical movement in recent years caught the liberal theological/ecclesiastical establishment by surprise. The reason: they had persuaded themselves that there were no bright men and women of evangelical persuasion.

Snake handlers, anti-intellectuals, King James Bible devotees, Sinclair Lewis creatures, mindless ranters, yes. Theologians, educators, top people in the arts, professions, business, government, communications, no.

Then suddenly bright evangelicals flooded the American scene.

Now a new tack seems to be developing. We may be bright, but we have an edge on the “funnies.” No less an authority than church historian Martin Marty assures us of this.

According to Marty, writing in Christian Century, there are no “mainline funnies,” only conservative (i.e., evangelical) ones.

I think he really means liberal mainliners, since he singles out a Southern Baptist and some conservative Episcopalians as laughable. (Tee-hee, chuckling, thighslapping, roaring laughable, to use Marty’s words.)

Hey, Marty—Anita Bryant is a “funny” and Malcolm Boyd isn’t? The Denver bishops are “funnies” but the House of Bishops who let James Pike destroy himself and devastate the church weren’t?

Marty quotes Arthur Koestler (in Janus, Random House): “We laugh because our emotions have a greater inertia and persistence than our reasoning processes.”

And it’s hard for bright people, even, to answer ridicule.

EUTYCHUS VIII

A Soothing Breeze

After reading the interview with Dr. Kantzer (April 7) I suspected that a fresh wind was blowing at CHRISTIANITY TODAY. After reading the article on evangelicals (“Evangelicals and the Inerrancy Question,” April 21) my suspicions have been confirmed. I, for one, want to express my appreciation to the selection committee and to Dr. Kantzer for providing us with a Christian statesman of his caliber.

I especially applaud his willingness to soothe the sores of the evangelical “radicals” (evidenced by the selection of questioners), yet unequivocally, albeit graciously, state his own convictions. I hope this spirit of reconciliation will be contagious through all the ranks of evangelicalism (in its broad sense).

Perhaps most encouraging is Kantzer’s predilection for orthopraxy along with his orthodoxy. I look forward to this emphasis in the pages of CHRISTIANITY TODAY and in the lives of its readers.

MARK PETTERSEN

Emporia, Kans.

I am thoroughly impressed. Dr. Kantzer’s inerrancy article is worth filing both for its boldness and balance. More important, it leaves us with no qualms as to his ability to edit a magazine of your caliber.

JIM CONGDON

Topeka Bible Church

Topeka, Kans.

I wish to express appreciation for CHRISTIANITY TODAY as a valuable resource in my ministry. Congratulations to Kenneth Kantzer as he assumes his editorial leadership. I look forward to the marks of his stated aims in future editions. His interview was excellent.

HERALD HASKELL

Community Christian Church

Twin Falls, Idaho

From one longtime subscriber, a sincere welcome to Kenneth Kantzer as editor. CHRISTIANITY TODAY had seemed to hit a nadir for me several years ago. Articles were becoming all too predictable, from a too-small number of contributing voices. Still I felt the subscription price was justified, if only for the unique quality of News and the annual book issue; for some time that was about the state of things.

With the coming of Harold Myra as publisher, a noticeable promise of rebirth seemed to emerge. I caught myself reading lead articles again. Some of the puffy pontificating of editorials turned towards more responsible interaction with complex issues. The Refiner’s Fire has offered quality and information more often than not. Minister’s Workshop seems to have greater variety and practicality of content. The magazine still helps more than any other in sorting out, “What’s being newly published that appears worth my investment of time to grapple with?” In short, this reader finds CHRISTIANITY TODAY presently more creative, informative, and stimulating than it was five years ago.

Dr. Kantzer’s broad experience and balanced integrity were evident in the April 7 interview. It is pleasing to see he has little romanticism concerning present evangelical problems and shortcomings. One senses that there is just enough “radical” in his notion of “radical biblical commitment” to promote increased kingdom usefulness for CHRISTIANITY TODAY in days to come.

MICHAEL A. ROGERS

Randall Memorial Baptist Church

Williamsville, N.Y.

Standing Ovation

About Leland Ryken’s article, “Were the Puritans Right About Sex?” (April 7): Bravo! Bravissimo! (ah-hemmm.… wonderfully refreshing).

FRED HYDE

Dallas, Tex.

I want to applaud the article by Leland Ryken. I consider it instructive, refreshing, and edifying.

SCOTT R. LONG

Belleville, Ill.

I must take issue with the article on Puritans. My knowledge of mainstream Puritan theology is, I admit, as small as Ryken assumes, but upon reading his account of church history in the fourth and fifth centuries, I am afraid that a grave shadow … is cast over the entire article.

I was astonished at the several blatant errors that reveal Ryken’s apparent disdain for the rich heritage we have in the early centuries of the church’s history. Indeed, Athanasius was a bishop of the fourth century, but to say that for him “the supreme message of Christ was the need for virginity” is preposterous. The man’s entire life was exhausted to preserve the very foundation of our faith, i.e., the doctrine of the Trinity. And then in the next paragraph to refer to Tertullian and Ambrose as having lived in the century after Athanasius shows nothing but shoddy research on the part of Ryken. Tertullian, in fact, was a Christian apologist in Carthage during the latter part of the second century. He died in 220 A.D., 80 years before Athanasius was even bom. Also, it would have been appreciated if Ryken had substantiated his summaries of the teachings of these church fathers. If he is going to take issue with them, they deserve at least that much respect.

As for Origen, he truly did castrate himself in the name of religion, but he is hardly a good representative of the early church’s view on virginity, for Ryken neglects to mention the fact that he was excommunicated from the church for that very act. In addition, several Egyptian synods of the third century, as well as the fifth and sixth Ecumenical Councils, branded him as a heretic and a rebel.

Finally, it was very grievous to me when he supposed that the apostate Council of Trent climaxed the teaching of the early church fathers. It did not.

It is obvious that Ryken lacks not only knowledge but also regard for the history of the early church. I would ask, Who was his teacher? Why would CHRISTIANITY TODAY print an article containing such disgraceful errors? Let me encourage Dr. Kantzer, as the new editor, to continue to safeguard the credibility of your magazine by printing articles that contain a little more respect for our church fathers and, if not respect, at least accuracy.

MARC DUNAWAY

Goleta, Calif.

•Origen was not excommunicated for that act.—ED.

Missing The Focus

In this review of my book Youth, Brainwashing and the Extremist Cults appearing in the March 24 issue, Mr. Melton comes to the inaccurate and unfortunate conclusion that I “advocate” kidnapping and all forms of deprogramming. My treatment of this controversial topic is essentially a description of the phenomenon, not a blanket endorsem*nt.

Regardless of one’s views on the rightness or wrongness of deprogramming, to categorically conclude (as the reviewer does) that it “does not work,” is a gross distortion of the facts. Furthermore, Melton’s assertion that ex-cult members who have been deprogrammed are incapable of leading a normal life or are in need of long-term psychiatric treatment ignores the clear evidence to the contrary presented in my book and supported by the research of other behavioral scientists.

It is unfortunate that your readers were left with the impression that the focal concern of my book is deprogramming rather than the spiritual and psychological seduction of American young people by the cults.

RONALD M. ENROTH

Professor of Sociology

Westmont College

Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Purpose Of Pain

I commend Mr. Yancey on his fine article (“Pain: The Tool of the Wounded Surgeon,” March 24). However, the statement that no hymn has been dedicated to pain is not quite correct. Consider for instance, “More Love To Thee,” by Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878). The third stanza reads:

Let sorrow do its work,

Send grief and pain;

Sweet are Thy messengers,

Sweet their refrain,

When they can sing with me,

More love, O Christ, to Thee,

More love to Thee, More love to Thee!

Is this not the purpose of pain in essence? Too bad this is a third stanza—that’s why we missed it!

GARY L. HAMBURGER

Grace Evangelical Free Church

Sacramento, Calif.