Page 5179 – Christianity Today (2024)

After a decade of study and discussion, the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy (ICBI) has gone out of existence—according to plan.

A group of conservative Christian leaders launched the organization in 1977 to strengthen and modernize arguments supporting the authority of the Bible. The ten-year effort culminated in late September with the Congress on the Bible II, which brought 3,000 laymen to Washington, D.C., to discuss the application of Scripture to current political issues and daily life.

According to ICBI chairman James Montgomery Boice, the council’s original purpose was to “explain and defend the doctrine of inerrancy as a necessary part of any valid doctrine of Scripture and a necessity for the health of the church.” The organization’s first major summit in 1978 produced a 19-point statement on the doctrine of inerrancy, which was signed by 300 conservative Christian leaders.

The second step was biblical interpretation. “You can say we have an inerrant Bible,” Boice said, “but if you handle it wrongly, we’ve still lost the battle.” A 1982 summit produced a 25-point guideline for interpreting Scripture. Also in 1982, the first Congress on the Bible educated laypeople about the work of the council’s first two summits. In 1986, a final summit produced a 170-point document on the application of Scripture to life.

Biblical Application

This year’s Congress on the Bible II completed the council’s work. Plenary sessions and workshops focused on practical aspects of the Bible. Seminars covered topics such as education, business, welfare, foreign policy, marriage and the family, hunger and poverty issues, AIDS, the law, and public policy. Said Charles Colson, chairman of the congress and founder of Prison Fellowship: “If Christ is king, he is king over all.… How then shall we serve? Not triumphalistically, not arrogantly, but humbly seeking to hear God’s voice … in every aspect of life.”

The ICBI congress cosponsored a community work project with Prison Fellowship. Furloughed inmates from Virginia’s Lorton Prison joined congress volunteers to do repairs on a women’s shelter run by a local church. Colson said the project was a vital part of the witness of the congress. “In the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, where they’re debating how to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to solve America’s ills, there are a group of convicts … and a whole lot of Christian volunteers who are out renovating the homes of some poor people …,” he said. “That’s Christians living in biblical faithfulness and biblical obedience.”

Many of the conference speakers encouraged Christians to become a more significant force in society. British writer Os Guiness warned of the dangers of falling into an “easy-care evangelicalism” that lacks the “decisive link between believing and behaving.”

Colson urged his audience to “live in obedient discipleship to challenge prevailing cultural values.” He said the church is in a “crisis hour,” because “despite the pockets of revival and evangelical resurgence going on in various continents, … Christianity as a cultural force has less influence today than in perhaps the last 1,500 years.”

Political Overtones?

Prior to the congress, there had been some concern that the Washington atmosphere, along with addresses by several politicians, would politicize the ICBI event. But theologian J. I. Packer, a charter member of the council, said the congress “rose above narrow party-line political concerns” and did not fall in line behind “any particular ideology.” Nonetheless, political topics were addressed.

A preconference briefing treated some 200 Christian leaders to a taste of the Washington political scene with addresses from former Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole and several members of Congress; a luncheon on Capitol Hill; and a trip to the White House complex for a meeting with representatives of the Reagan administration. Speakers addressed AIDS, government deception, p*rnography, Central America, and Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court.

During the congress itself, participants heard from Attorney General Edwin Meese; conservative political writer William F. Buckley; and U.S. Sen. William Armstrong (R-Colo.). Boice acknowledged in an interview that there “probably was somewhat of a conservative Republican tone” to the meeting, but said it was not something the council planned.

“We were trying to be as unpolitical as possible,” he said. “Our whole point from the beginning was … you don’t bring in the kingdom of God by political means. As a citizen of a democracy, you have a duty … to take part in it, but what really makes a difference is citizenry whose hearts have changed because they have come into contact with God.”

U.S. Rep. Paul Henry (R-Mich.), reminded the preconference briefing, “The Bible is simply not a political handbook out of which a ‘litmus test’ on political specifics can be drawn. As you struggle to seek to apply the authoritative norms of sacred Scripture to perplexing and complex issues of the moment, I urge you to avoid the temptation to claim inerrancy for the human applications drawn from it.”

Over its ten-year life span, Boice said, ICBI achieved what it set out to do. “A battle like this [over biblical inerrancy] is unending—every generation has to fight it in one form or another. But we feel … that we’ve done what we can do.”

Other original council members, including Packer and Kenneth Kantzer, professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, agreed that ICBI had accomplished its goals. Said Packer: “I think … we can lay ourselves to rest honorably and thankfully.”

At the conclusion of the congress, ICBI passed on to the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) the responsibility to uphold the authority of Scripture and its application to daily life. Robert Dugan, director of the NAE’S Washington Office on Public Affairs, said this is “a symbolic passing of the torch” and will not mean any new assignments for NAE. Rather, he said, ICBI believed NAE was “the most broadly representative group” that could continue urging Christians to apply “a high view of Scripture to national life.”

Leading television ministers assured a congressional subcommittee last month that new steps toward self-regulation will prevent financial abuses similar to the ones that plagued the PTL ministry under Jim and Tammy Bakker. At the same time, members of the House subcommittee quizzed Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department officials about strengthening government scrutiny of religious broadcasters.

Gordon D. Loux, president of Prison Fellowship Ministries and chairman of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), defended that group’s effectiveness as a monitoring organization. “What you would like to see done is already being done,” he told subcommittee chairman U.S. Rep. J. J. Pickle (D-Tex.). ECFA, a voluntary, 400-member organization, stresses compliance with standards of full financial disclosure, board membership that is not dominated by family members or ministry employees, annual independent audits, and strict fund-raising guidelines.

ECFA has been criticized as ineffective because PTL was a member in good standing from 1978 until December 1986. Beginning last March, abuses of donor funds and tax-exempt status by PTL have been under examination. Loux conceded that ECFA relied on assurances of financial integrity by PTL and its accounting firm. “Hindsight shows that this reliance was misplaced,” he told the subcommittee. He added that the ECFA board would meet before the end of October to consider instituting a nationwide network of volunteer accountants and attorneys to conduct random audits of member organizations.

A second attempt at self-regulation comes from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). Executive director Ben Armstrong told Pickle’s subcommittee that before the PTL troubles came to light, NRB leaders had developed a code of ethics concerning board structure, money management, disclosure, and fund raising. The code will be implemented by a new NRB panel called the Ethics and Financial Integrity Commission (EFICOM), and it is expected to become mandatory for all NRB members after a vote at the organization’s annual convention in February (CT, Oct. 16, 1987, p. 44).

Armstrong acknowledged that the new standards, which closely resemble ECFA rules, may cost NRB some of its members. Also, required public disclosure invites “the possibility of public criticism whenever one of our members fails to live up to the policies that we have established,” Armstrong said. “The alternative to proclaiming such principles is to remain silent in the face of impropriety—and, worse, to imply by silence that such misconduct is condoned.”

Oliver Thomas, counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, said he hopes EFICOM is ratified by NRB’S membership. If so, he said, “it will take a lot of pressure off Congress and the IRS to move hastily to change existing law. It may be that we don’t need any change.”

Government Involvement

Religious broadcasters at the hearing, including Jerry Falwell and John Ankerberg, expressed embarrassment over the PTL scandal, while government officials expressed frustration. They said tax laws constrain their efforts to police organizations that flout the law, but no specific recommendations for changing the law were offered. IRS Commissioner Lawrence B. Gibbs said the vast majority of churches and religious groups operate within the law. The few that violate the law are difficult to catch, he said, because laws protecting religious liberty hinder IRS access to financial information.

Gibbs explained that according to the tax code, churches and religious organizations are exempt from paying federal income tax if they are organized and operated exclusively for religious purposes. In addition, individuals who support these groups financially may deduct their contributions from their income tax. Tax-exempt status calls for the organization to serve a public purpose, avoid substantial lobbying efforts, and refrain from political campaign activity. Its earnings may not enhance the wealth of any private individual. And any earnings from business enterprises not related to the group’s religious purpose are subject to taxation.

A group that is classified as a “church” enjoys more favorable tax treatment than one classified as a “religious organization.” Churches are not required to apply to the IRS for tax exemption, receive explicit IRS notification of tax exemption, or file annual information forms, known as Form 990. Because of the favorable tax status accorded to churches, individuals masquerading as “ministers” for tax purposes have been prosecuted in court for tax avoidance.

Most television ministries would be classified as religious organizations, rather than churches, but some confusion on this point is evident. In his testimony before Pickle’s subcommittee, Oklahoma evangelist Oral Roberts said, “I have always thought of the Oral Roberts ministry as a church. Our ministry organizations perform all of the traditional functions of a church. We hold religious services on a regular basis, we perform marriages, baptisms, and funerals.” However, the IRS classifies the Oral Roberts ministry as a religious organization.

Roberts said IRS rules should be uniformly applied. “If the Oral Roberts ministry is required to file these reports, then should not the Catholics, the Mormons, the Baptists, the Methodists, and all other churches also be required to file these same reports?”

Part of the problem, according to Gibbs, is that there is no statutory definition of “church” anywhere in the tax code. “Congress has left it to the IRS, the courts, and the organizations themselves to make this determination. Herein lies the first and most basic problem in administering the tax laws in this area.” IRS guidelines include 15 criteria that distinguish a “church.” Two of the most important factors, Gibbs said, are whether the organization has a membership not associated with any other church or denomination, and whether it holds regular meetings.

Because of the constraints placed on government inquiries into church matters, Gibbs said, the IRS finds itself in the position of reacting to highly publicized accounts of abuse by religious groups, rather than initiating investigations. He has formed a tax-exempt-organization advisory group and is seeking input from church leaders about administering tax laws relating to churches.

Maintaining Separation

Keeping church and state from becoming entangled as these laws are reviewed was a clear concern of both the House subcommittee and the religious broadcasters who testified. Pickle, in announcing the hearing, said, “The subcommittee is not undertaking to investigate any specific television ministry or tax-exempt organization. We are not questioning religious practices or beliefs.”

Nonetheless, some religious broadcasters feared the congressmen were setting a bad precedent. D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge (Fla.) Presbyterian Church and president of Coral Ridge Ministries, told the subcommittee, “It is axiomatic that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and I think what we are seeing here is a dangerous intermeddling” of state and church. Kennedy added that this nation’s Founding Fathers believed church and state were “two separate spheres, both under God. However, today there are those in this country who would like to change that and would like to put the church under the state.”

Falwell commended the committee, saying, “It’s your job to do what you are doing.” He criticized television ministers who rely on gimmicks such as telling viewers to place their hands on the television set to make contact with the power of God, or who send handkerchiefs or bottled holy water through the mail. “Everybody has a right to say what they want to,” he commented, “but somebody’s got to have a right to question whether it is so.”

A sense of cooperation and common purpose was evident throughout most of the hearing, but that was threatened late in the day when Pickle received a copy of a letter mailed July 15 by NRB. The undated letter went out over Ben Armstrong’s signature shortly after he received information about plans for the hearing. It solicited contributions toward a $1 million “war chest” to defend religious broadcasters against government encroachment, warning specifically about the Pickle initiative. Armstrong’s letter warned that Pickle’s subcommittee planned to “delve into personal ministry business that is protected by the U.S. Constitution.… Truthfully, we see this move by Congressman Pickle and others as another sly way to harass ministries one by one until we are forced out of existence … one by one.”

The letter invited recipients to send $25 so NRB could oppose “the enemy forces amassed against us.” In exchange for the contribution, donors were to receive tapes of speeches by Vice President George Bush and evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. A spokesman for Pickle said the congressman was surprised and angered by the letter. “He is at a loss to understand how such a letter could be going out at the same time Ben was saying he wanted to work with us.”

In response, Armstrong said the letter was mailed before he met personally with Pickle on July 21 and was assured that the subcommittee was not investigating religion per se. Armstrong said Pickle’s first letter about the hearing, mailed in early July, was “ominous” and threatened “a departure from what Congress has been doing for 200 years.” A follow-up letter explaining Armstrong’s change of opinion is scheduled to be mailed to NRB members, and the November issue of NRB’SReligious Broadcasting magazine contains an article by Armstrong assessing the hearings and the subcommittee’s purpose. Armstrong said Pickle has been invited to address NRB members at the group’s annual convention in Washington, D.C., early next year.

By Beth Spring.

While many political observers say the Religious Right has lost the prominence it gained after Ronald Reagan’s landslide elections, one conservative group continues to wield considerable political clout.

Concerned Women for America (CWA) is emerging as one of the most influential and outspoken activist groups on the American political scene. Emphasizing traditional values and family concerns, the group has made an impact on public policy debates nationwide and garnered the praise of many leading conservatives, including President Reagan.

Range Of Concerns

CWA was founded in 1979 by Beverly LaHaye, a Christian author and lecturer on marriage and family life. Beginning with nine members, the organization now claims the allegiance of more than half a million women, with 1,800 local affiliates called Prayer/Action Chapters. Each chapter is active in its own community and can also be mobilized for prayer and lobbying efforts at the national level. LaHaye says her organization’s membership is diverse, but the majority can be characterized as politically and theologically conservative women with families.

CWA’S list of concerns is broad. The organization backs the rights of the unborn; human rights; religious freedom; quality public education; and a strong national defense. It opposes the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA); the spread of AIDS; sexual promiscuity, especially among the young; p*rnography; violent and sexually explicit entertainment; drug abuse; violence among families; and Communist expansion in the Western hemisphere. On the local level, CWA chapters have been involved in opposing school-based health clinics that provide contraceptives to teenagers. They have also called for sex-education courses that promote abstinence until marriage. CWA is given much of the credit, along with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, for defeating a proposed state ERA last year in Vermont.

CWA employs 28 staff members in its Capitol Hill office, including two lobbyists and six attorneys. While the organization has participated in a variety of legislative battles, its impact has also been felt in the judiciary.

In 1986, CWA attorneys successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Larry Witters v. State of Washington Department of Services for the Blind. There, the high court ruled that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not prohibit blind ministerial students from receiving state educational benefits for religious studies.

In a separate court battle, CWA is providing legal defense for a group of Tennessee families asking that their children be exempted from public school classes that use materials offensive to their fundamentalist Christian beliefs. Late this summer, a three-judge federal appeals court panel overturned a lower court ruling in favor of the Christian parents. The case is being appealed to a full panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (CT, Oct. 2, 1987, p. 50).

Internationally, the organization has developed a department of humanitarian affairs to provide food, clothing, and medical supplies to Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica. The program includes the establishment of farms, schools, and medical clinics as part of a long-term relief effort. CWA supports Reagan’s plan to aid the Nicaraguan contras. In addition, the group has spoken out on behalf of Christians behind the Iron Curtain.

Due to its nonprofit status, CWA cannot endorse a particular candidate for public office. However, during the coming presidential election, the group plans to get involved by distributing candidates’ voting records and urging people to vote.

Political Clout

Evidence of CWA’S growing political stature came with Reagan’s recent appearance at the group’s fourth annual convention held in Arlington, Virginia. The room resembled a political party convention, as Reagan entered to a sustained standing ovation, the fanfare of the marine band, and the waving of placards. The President said he felt as if “the reinforcements have just arrived.”

Most of his address centered on rallying support for the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, sending aid to the Nicaraguan contras, and stopping Communist aggression. But Reagan took time to praise CWA.

“In just a few short years, you’ve become the largest politically active women’s group in the nation,” he said. He also credited LaHaye with being “one of the powerhouses on the political scene today and one of the reasons that the grassroots are more and more a conservative province.”

Reagan’s appearance came as word was circulating around Washington that the Bork nomination was headed for difficult waters. In a three-week period, CWA collected 76,000 petitions from members in all 50 states urging Bork’s confirmation. At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, LaHaye was allowed to testify in favor of Bork on a panel by herself, while most other religious groups were excluded from the process.

Other conservative leaders echo Reagan’s words of praise. “I think [CWA] is the most effective group that we have today on the Religious Right,” said Paul Weyrich, president of Coalitions for America, a conservative umbrella lobby group. “It is comprised of high-quality, success-oriented people who are inclined to take political activism seriously and who have the best follow-through of any group that I work with.” Weyrich said he believes CWA’S influence has been greatly underestimated by much of the Washington establishment.

Even opponents, including People for the American Way (PAW), the group working against CWA in the Tennessee textbook case, mix praise with their criticism. John Buchanan, a Southern Baptist clergyman and PAW chairman, said he “congratulates” LaHaye for “a very effective job in organizing what has become a very large and active conservative group.” But Buchanan said Christians who hold a different point of view should also become politically active. “I do not believe their [CWA’S] perspective represents the Christian perspective. It is representative of one group of folk who tend to come down on the far right of the political spectrum.”

Several mainstream evangelical groups have worked closely with CWA on a variety of issues, yet many are hesitant to fully embrace the group. Some raise concerns about the extent to which CWA blends religion and conservative politics. Others are uncomfortable with CWA’S frequent use of strong rhetoric within the political debate.

There is uneasiness about CWA’S largely one-woman leadership. And some have raised questions about who determines CWA issue positions and whether those positions are “spoonfed” to members rather than allowing individuals to think issues through themselves. Yet most political observers—even if they say the Religious Right is in decline—agree that CWA is mobilizing grassroots activists and achieving results.

By Kim A. Lawton.

Other-worldly witness

Evangelicals who have a one-dimensional view of the mission of the church are criticized roundly by non-evangelicals and by those evangelicals who declare that social action is an integral component of the gospel. This result springs from the failure to distinguish with care the difference between the mission of the church, which is world evangelization, and the work of individual Christians, who have a twofold relationship as members of the Kingdom of God and of Caesar’s kingdom. Jesus declared that His kingdom is not of this world, and the church, which is in the world and sent to witness to the world, is not of the world.

—Harold Lindsell in

The New Paganism

The “religious” bit

Along with much bad thinking that has come down to us from the last four hundred years, goes split living.… People who live compartmentalized lives worship God and go to church and do their “religious” bit on Sundays; then they switch that off and pursue their professions, weekday work, weekend hobbies, and all their relationships as though these were matters entirely separate from their Christian commitment. They don’t even try to see their lives as a whole in terms of God and his Word. Instead they slip into their religious compartment on Sundays and their secular compartment on the other days of the week and allow no communication between the two.

—J. I. Packer in

Your Father Loves You

Still a sinner

There is something terribly right about … realizing that our struggle with sin is in many ways similar to an alcoholic’s struggle with drinking. It’s never over.

How often I find myself talking about sin in the past tense as if being a sinner is something I’m beyond—a page turned in the book of my life. But sin is like alcoholism. Sinners are never cured; they simply decide to stop sinning … and it’s a daily decision.

—John Fischer in

Contemporary Christian

Music (Sept. 1987)

Preaching that works

Words without deeds are empty, but deeds without words are dumb. It is stupid to set them against each other. It is, for example, stupid to say: “The one thing that matters is to go everywhere and preach the gospel; all other activities such as schools and hospitals and programmes for social action are at best merely auxiliary and at worst irrelevant.” …

On the other hand, it is equally stupid to say: “Preaching is a waste of time. Forget it and get on with tackling the real human problems of poverty, injustice and oppression.”

—Lesslie Newbigin in

Mission in Christ’s Way

Not “they” but “we”

I talked with Keith (Green) about a month before he died, and he told me, “You know, Steve, I finally realized that it’s not ‘they’ that have to get their lives together but it’s ‘we’ who have to get our lives together.” And I have to say that for myself. It’s been easy to stand on a platform the last few years and to point the finger at people and the inadequacies and shortcomings in their Christian lives. But when I finally slowed down enough to look at my own life, I realized that I couldn’t do that anymore. When I exhort, it’s from within now, but it’s got to always be with love.

—Steve Camp in Premiere

magazine (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Prayer and the dipsy-dumpster

Half the time the difficulty with daily prayer is not a lack of time, but assumptions about prayer that belong in the dipsy-dumpster. The other half of the time, neglect of daily prayer is due not to lack of time, but to being either a religious fraidy-cat or a spiritually lackadaisical Christian.

—Mitch Finley in

U.S. Catholic (Feb. 1987)

Something happened

Many treatments of Jesus get bogged down in a discussion of the possibility of miracles; properly speaking, that is a philosophical rather than a historical or even a theological problem.… [A]ll that need be noted is that ancient Christian, Jewish and pagan sources all agreed that Jesus did extraordinary things not easily explained by human means. While Jesus’ disciples pointed to the Spirit of God as the source of His power, Jewish and pagan adversaries spoke of demonic or magical forces. It never occurred to any of the ancient polemicists to claim that nothing happened.

—John P. Meier in the New

York Times Book Review

(Dec. 21, 1986)

Are we entering a “post-hymnal” age? As strange as it may seem, the answer for now appears to be a qualified yes.

It was Martin Luther who capitalized on the development of print and gave the German people the Bible and the hymnal in their own language. And it was this that allowed Reformation believers to hear God through his Word and speak to him through the hymnbook. Today, however, the hymnbook is being increasingly discarded as part of the church’s accommodation to the video revolution.

Many church leaders say traditional hymns are too hard to understand, too theological in language. Some have discarded their hymnals in favor of simple worship choruses sung from memory or with the help of an overhead projector. But these uncomplicated songs may in fact mirror the video age in which they were born: as short and encapsulated as news stories, and as repetitive as fast-food commercials.

Let us take a closer look at these “tiny hymns”—miniature both in length and in content—that threaten to replace our historic hymns. Their very title—“praise and worship” music—suggests they are principally texts of adoration and praise. This is surely commendable—despite their obvious limitations—and we should be grateful the movement has revived the ancient practice of singing Scripture verbatim. But labeling this new form suggests “praise and worship” texts are new, and that is surely not true—our hymnals are full of worthy “praise and worship” words.

These new pieces are short, often no longer than two lines. Their main characteristic is simplicity; usually only one idea is stated, and it may be repeated many times. Those having more than one “stanza” change only a word or two with each repetition. Nor is the music really contemporary in style. With a few exceptions (mostly borrowed from Jewish folk dances), the tunes and harmonies are ultrasimple in the gospel-song tradition.

Perhaps the best illustration of this is the popular chorus “Alleluia.” It repeats that word of praise eight times, using only four different melody notes and three chords. The second stanza repeats the words “He’s my Savior” eight times, with similar changes in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas.

Before it appeared in print, the chorus was learned in a much stronger oral tradition. In it the words “He’s my Savior” of the second stanza were alternated with the word “Alleluia,” and so on. This version gave each stanza both unity and variety—an agreed norm for both a work of art and a folk hymn with its own artless charm. But then, it would not then be so simple—and today, simplicity is in!

Nothing New Under The Sun

But choruses are not new. They are the logical successors of the refrains of gospel songs and the “spirituals” (of both black and white heritage) that emerged from the camp-meeting revivals of the early 1800s. Furthermore, those well-known forms were patterned after the alternation of stanza and refrain that has always characterized secular folksong. A refrain would contain or suggest the central message of a song; then it was interspersed with stanzas elaborating on that theme.

In nineteenth-century revivalism, the refrains or “choruses” of gospel songs were often sung without using the stanzas. Simple songs—like “Draw Me Nearer,” “At the Cross,” “We’re Marching to Zion”—became even simpler: only the central thought was expressed. And they could be sung spontaneously, from memory.

So, who needs a hymnal?

The next logical step was to omit the stanzas completely, and simply write the refrain, or “chorus.” This was common in the 1940s in the Youth for Christ (YFC) movement. Choruses were standard fare in the Saturday night mix of worship, evangelism, and entertainment. But those choruses were quite different from today’s. They usually expressed the same concepts as their gospel song antecedents—narratives of Christian experience or devotional expressions directed to Jesus alone. Typical of these choruses are “Gone, gone, gone, gone! Yes, my sins are gone”; “I have the joy, joy, joy, joy, down in my heart”; “For God so loved the world”; and “Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before.”

These earlier forms were all products of renewal movements in the church—first in the highly emotional brush-arbor camp meetings of the early nineteenth century; later in the urban-centered “Second Awakening” under Charles G. Finney and the evangelistic efforts of D. L. Moody, R. A. Torrey, and Billy Sunday; and finally in the parachurch movements associated with Youth for Christ and radio evangelism. It should not be surprising that the new choruses first appeared as part of today’s charismatic renewal movement.

It may be argued that these new expressions are stronger than the YFC choruses, since they express adoration and praise rather than personal testimony. “King of kings and Lord of Lords, glory hallelujah,” “We have come into his house and gathered in his name to worship him,” “Don’t you know it’s time to praise the Lord,” “I love you, Lord, and I lift my voice,” and “Sing hallelujah to the Lord” are good examples. Many of these texts abound in Scripture quotations, especially the Psalms. Some, like “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain,” “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” “Thou art worthy, O Lord,” “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord,” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God,” are taken completely from the Scripture.

Praising Praise, Worshiping Worship

Take just one of these refrains and compare it with the worship hymns it may be replacing. For instance, “Let’s just praise the Lord” seems to express a casual approach to the holy service of worship. The problem may be with the word just—as in “Let’s just sit down and have a cup of coffee.”

The following exercise might be more revealing if the words were spoken audibly, which the reader may or may not choose to do:

Let’s just praise the Lord!

Praise to the Lord the Almighty, the King of Creation!

O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!

Let’s just praise the Lord!

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing,

Our helper he, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

Let’s just praise the Lord!

Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty,

God in three persons, blessed Trinity!

Let’s just praise the Lord!

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.

Let’s just praise the Lord!

O worship the king, all glorious above,

O gratefully sing his power and his love.

Let’s just praise the Lord!

Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

There is no shadow of turning with Thee.

The constant repetition of phrases such as “Let’s just praise,” or “Come, let us worship the King,” or “Don’t you know it’s time to praise the Lord” sounds more like an “invitation to praise” than praise itself. An Assemblies of God leader from India recently said his American friends seem to be “praising praise” and “worshiping worship.” But the larger hymns not only call us to adoration; they describe the excellence of God and recount his promises and mighty deeds—stating the motivation for worship.

The New Testament Standard

Some Christians prefer to be called “restorationist” because they believe they are returning to the worship and ministry experiences of the apostolic period. But how closely do they follow the early church’s standards for worship music?

The apostle Paul mentions three distinct types of song: “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs” (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). We believe these were different types of music—in origin, in text, and possibly even in the way they were performed.

Psalms no doubt included all the psalms and canticles common to Jewish worship—the historic, classical worship expressions known to all Jewish Christians who had grown up hearing them in the temple and the synagogue: songs of praise and thanksgiving to Yahweh, didactic psalms, witness psalms, psalms of petition and lament.

Hymns were probably new songs that expressed the Christology of the new sect. A number of these hymns appear in Paul’s letters, written in the patterns of classical Greek poetry. Like many of the hymns of Martin Luther and Charles Wesley, they were written to express, and thus teach, Christian doctrine. One is in the form of a simple creed, or statement of faith:

Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion:

He was manifested in the flesh,

vindicated in the Spirit,

seen by angels,

preached among the nations,

believed on in the world,

taken up in glory.

(1 Tim. 3:16)

In another example, the poetic (and possibly antiphonal) form is obvious:

The saying is sure:

If we have died with him, we shall also live with him;

if we endure, we shall also reign with him;

if we deny him, he also will deny us;

if we are faithless, he remains faithful—

for he cannot deny himself.

(2 Tim. 2:11–13)

The patristic fathers and modern musicologists both agree that spiritual songs described ecstatic singing that was either wordless or had unintelligible words—singing in tongues. It is the one type of New Testament song that belongs exclusively to modern-day Pentecostals and charismatics. But it is still fair to ask: How does the new music measure up to the total spectrum of New Testament musical practice?

The new chorus literature is—according to its title—exclusively “praise and worship.” But many would contend that if this is the church’s only song, praise becomes both simple and simplistic. On the one hand, we ought to rejoice that the movement has reinstated the practice of singing the words of Scripture. But Scripture choruses are but snippets of Holy Writ; their use may be compared to singing “proof texts.” On the other hand, Roman Catholics, by comparison, today sing or say major portions of a psalm in every celebration of the mass. Over three years, in just Sunday observances, over 150 different psalm passages will be used. Furthermore, modern choruses pointedly omit all the expressions of the didactic, the penitential, and the petitionary psalms, and contain nothing comparable to the psalms of lament. Nor does the new music make an effort to teach the doctrines of our faith.

Moreover, except for the Scripture fragments used, this type of contemporary worship tends to ignore the traditional forms that express the continuity of our faith and the perpetuity of God’s covenants with his people. The early Christians knew they were still the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—but also of David and Solomon and the prophets who left their songs to be sung in worship. The sixteenth-century followers of Luther understood that they had the same heritage, and they added the patristic and medieval hymns of Ambrose of Milan, Fortunatus, Gregory the Great, Francis of Assisi, Rhabanus Maurus, and of the two Bernards—one of Clairvaux and one of Cluny.

Until recently, evangelicals acknowledged in their music their identity with the same family tree, and we added the hymns of Luther, Gerhardt, Calvin, Wesley, Newton, Bonar, and many others. When we stood to sing their songs, we were joining our own spirits and voices with theirs and the thousands of believers who followed in their train, exulting in the glory and redeeming love of God. And our faith was strengthened. Today, some of our family of faith seem to be willing, even eager, to discard this heritage for a simpler fare that may disappear as suddenly as it has flowered.

It is probably true—especially in our less-literate day—that many worshipers have difficulty finding their way through the phrases of a standard hymn. But should we reduce our liturgical statements to those that every person, of any age, will understand immediately? The answer, of course, is no. Like the ancient creeds of the church, like many passages in Scripture—like even the Lord’s Prayer—we repeat them because the historic and continuing church has found in them its understanding of our faith. Their meaning comes to us slowly, but surely. And in the meantime, their truth has been preserved for us and for our children. It is still true, as C. H. Sisson said, and Brian Morris quoted in Ritual Murder: “There is no such thing as passing on profound truths in superficial speech.”

Using The New Music Well

An increasing number of church musicians admit they have reluctantly added this music style to their worship resources. They felt compelled to do so by the large number of folk who heard “praise and worship” music in another “successful and rapidly growing” church, and came home with glowing reports of its significance. Competition, after all, is a factor in church life today: If you don’t give people church music they want, they may go down the street where they can get it.

In a recent article, “What to Do with Church Hoppers,” William Self, pastor of Wieuca Road Baptist Church in Atlanta, said: “I’ve been hammering my folks with the need to be steadfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord—not a popular theme in these days of rootlessness. Somehow, we have to make disciples instead of inspiration junkies.”

Disciples, of course, are people accustomed to discipline. And how many of our folk understand that the central requirement of worship is not “getting a blessing,” but giving God an acceptable sacrifice of praise? A true sacrifice is always a costly thing, not a demand for instant gratification of our pleasure needs.

Even so, it may be wise to use the best examples of the new music. It is surely an appealing form in our day and probably an example of the folkish styles that tend to appear in times of spiritual renewal. The “tiny hymns” are quite ideal for an informal service in the home or on the beach, for Sunday evening worship or the prayer meeting. In regular worship, these choruses can be used much like the historic antiphons, preceding and following a more serious, more didactic hymn.

For instance, “Let’s Just Praise the Lord” could provide an introduction and coda to the chorale to which we compared it—“Praise to the Lord, the Almighty.” The chorus “He Is Lord” would help prepare the congregation for the biblically based, theologically rich hymn by F. Bland Tucker, “All praise to thee, for thou, O King divine, didst yield the glory that of right was thine, that in our darkened hearts thy grace might shine. Alleluia!” Others would serve well as preparation for, or a response to, the pastoral prayer.

Some churches are using this music as “preparation for worship.” In our evangelical tradition, the organ prelude is, unfortunately, not used as an aid to quiet meditation, serving merely as background—even as competition—to the noisy “fellowship” that seems to be the first priority for many. So in some churches, these “tiny hymns” are sung for about ten minutes before the service begins. As a result, conversation ceases and there is opportunity for a gradual quieting of the spirit and focusing of the mind in preparation for the meeting with God. When the service begins, using the standard hymns of the church in good liturgical design helps to make their meaning clear.

Must Our Worship Be Nonliterate?

We cannot expect this generation to respond to hymns that are rich in content unless they are taught carefully and used convincingly. The shallow-but-pleasurable emotional response to worship choruses is derived from the repetition of a few simple phrases. Those who expect worship to be more reasoned and rational must patiently and lovingly introduce their people to the deeper emotional resources of words that will truly challenge and stimulate the imagination. Texts of great hymns have done this since the sixteenth century, and they still have the power to do so—even in this post-Gutenberg era. Perhaps we can use our new nonverbal languages to clarify the meaning of words, and vice versa.

It may also be argued that the younger generation is “turned off” by certain classic hymns that contain obscure and/or archaic language. Hymnal editors are encouraged to revise the texts of older hymns to match the new Scripture versions and modern prayer language, so that God is addressed as “you” instead of “thou.” Many churches would also insist on the elimination of sexist language pertaining to people; for example, “Good Christian Men, Rejoice” is easily changed to “Good Christians All, Rejoice.”

Church musicians and ministers should also get to know the rich new hymns being produced today. It is ironic that many churches overemphasize ephemeral, simplistic materials and ignore the “explosion” of exciting new hymns being produced in Great Britain and North America by Timothy Dudley-Smith, Bryan Jeffrey Leech, Margaret Clarkson, Fred Pratt Green, Bryan Wren, Christopher Idle, and others.

Turn Off The TV!

A recent public-service announcement aired on NBC Television offers some sound advice. In it, Steve Allen, the gifted musician and comedian, appears and says: “Don’t let television dominate your life. Walk over and turn the … thing off. Get a good book and read it!” Perhaps, for us, that book might be a hymnal, a stimulus to aid our personal worship.

This practice was common in earlier times, when worshipers carried the hymnbook, as well as the Bible, to church. At home it was used for singing in family worship and for reading in personal devotions.

A good hymnal contains many paraphrases of Scripture and is a compact handbook of Christian theology in poetic form. It also includes noble examples of all the forms of prayer with which we respond to God’s self-revealing—adoration, confession, thanksgiving, petition, supplication, surrender, and dedication. It can supply thoughts and words to express our devotion when we have difficulty finding our own. Used regularly, it enlarges and enriches our personal vocabulary of worship, and—when we meet in church on Sunday—helps us sing the hymns with joy and understanding.

Donald P. Hustad is senior professor of church music at Southern Baptist Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, and author of Jubilate! Church Music in the Evangelical Tradition.

From a sermon delivered at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church, Hillsdale, Michigan, upon the baptism of Jacob Stewart Roche.

It was some 40 years ago, but I remember it well: a baby’s cry at three in the morning. I reached out my hand, rocked the cradle, and groggily assured our firstborn that his daddy was near and that all was well: “Sleep, baby, sleep. Don’t worry about a thing!”

I recalled this nightly exercise the other day when I read the Sermon on the Mount and noted again how, almost repetitiously, Jesus exhorted his disciples: “Do not worry” (Matt. 6:25, 31, 34), and “Why do you worry?” (6:28).

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many theologians and philosophers also were saying, “There’s nothing to worry about.” They said it, however, on foolhardy assumptions, like that of the essential goodness of man, the inevitability of progress, and utopia-just-around-the-corner. Swiss theologian Karl Barth preached that optimistic view until he was suddenly shocked awake.

The steady loss of young men from his congregation and the ever-increasing black armbands worn by women whose husbands and sons and sweethearts would never return from the battlefields of World War I shattered his confidence in the future. Barth then read and reread Paul’s epistle to the Romans. There he found plenty to worry about: the sinfulness of man, the perversity of history, the dread judgment of a holy God, man’s need of supernatural salvation.

Some years ago, while lecturing abroad, I lodged with a professor friend in Seoul, Korea. One Sunday morning as he left very early to preach at an army compound, he said, “Don’t worry about a thing!” Soon I heard strange noises in that unfamiliar home, and on investigating found that water pipes in the basem*nt were leaking—in fact, leaking furiously.

Mrs. Henry and I set to work at once emptying pans and then pails of water as we tried to cope with a situation that worsened steadily, for in that maze of pipes I could not find the master control. “Don’t worry about a thing” is scant comfort when one is caught in a swirl of circ*mstances that seemingly have no purpose and are indifferent to personal expectations.

It is that way, too, when modern scientism postulates a universe without purpose, regards man as an accidental by-product of an evolutionary explosion, and engulfs human personality in a network of impersonal processes. Someone has called this an effort to capture the real world in a laboratory test tube. It leads to the contemporary creed, “I believe in Big Bang yesterday, in Big Brother or Big Bucks today, and in Big Blank in the life to come.” Adept at controlling cosmic power, scientism is a stranger to moral and spiritual power. Once hailed as the biggest advance in Western civilization, the Atomic Age now cannot cope with nuclear waste and even trembles as the clock of destiny ticks, perhaps relentlessly, toward nuclear midnight.

“Sleep, baby, sleep! Don’t worry about a thing!” No, Jacob Stewart Roche, there is much to worry about; there is good reason to cry in the night. The prophets of liberty are vanishing, the freedom is fragile and not self-sustaining. Predatory powers are restless for world revolution. Totalitarian nations have gulags. And free world nations mortgage their future by spiritual neglect.

Sooner than you know, Jacob Stewart, you may need to decide whether some ideals are worth living for, even worth dying for. You will need to decide whether to betray or to augment the great moral and spiritual heritage of the West. Someday you must decide between deities true and deities false, and choice of the wrong God will lead to a dead end for human worth and destiny. We refuse to yield you to a world of chance, change, relativism, and skepticism; we who cherish you, claim you instead for the living Lord, for God the Creator and Redeemer and Judge.

When Jesus said, “Do not worry,” he knew only too well the horrendous reality of evil and the dread depth of the human predicament. He knew the whole range of earthly anxieties: “The pagans run after these things” (Matt. 6:32), he said, the things they made their priorities—food, raiment, survival.

But when Jesus said, “Do not worry,” he was reassuring disciples and believers, not pagans. Put first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, he said, and everything else will fall into place. “Do not worry.”

His point was not that natural evils and moral evils do not exist, or that believers will be spared hardship and pain and suffering. In Jesus’ day, anesthesia and antibiotics were unknown; pain was unmitigated pain, and suffering was unmitigated suffering. Saul of Tarsus wrote, moreover, that the apostles were perceived as “men condemned to die … a spectacle to the whole universe … fools for Christ … the scum of the earth” (1 Cor. 4:9–13). He suffered political injustice, and at the height of his career was confined to the Mamertine prison. When you are in Rome, see for yourself what sort of hellhole it was.

What Jesus taught his disciples was to put God first and to subsume all else under him: Caesar, survival, money, status, power, everything. Caesar has his place, but there is one Lord, the Lord Jesus Christ; survival has its place, but he who clings to physical life above all other values betrays eternal perspectives; mammon has its place, but love of money is a root of evil; other things have their place as well, but life’s true fullness does not consist of an infinity of sex, of status, or of things.

Accordingly, the early Christians anchored their lives to three great certainties:

• They knew that—for the believer—the worst that can happen is already past. God had already judged their sin and Christ had borne it; they had made their own the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. They knew Jesus as “the way to the Father.”
• They knew that—for the believer—however dark it may be, the present always has a brighter side. And we know that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28). For Paul, the “all things” of Romans 8:28 included even “the things that happened” to him in Rome (Phil. 1:12), including his imprisonment and eventual execution by Roman soldiers. As the psalmist put it: “He alone is my rock and my salvation; he is my fortress … trust in him at all times” (Ps. 62:6–8). God is the God of all seasons and the God of “all things.”
• They knew that—for the believer—the best that will happen lies in the future. Even sudden death is sudden glory, for to be “with Christ” is “better,” yes, “far better,” than what this earthly life offers (Phil. 1:23).

When Jesus impressed these truths on his disciples he was poised on the very brink of eternity. It was while on the way to the cross, to his own crucifixion, that he told his disciples to believe in God and also in him, the Redeemer Son. On the way to the cross it was Jesus who had peace, whereas the disciples, although not facing crucifixion, had troubled hearts. To those troubled disciples and to us as well Jesus bequeathed his own unique peace: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives you” (John 14:27).

I tell you that a peace that can look beyond the terrors of crucifixion to resurrection morning—a peace that can see in the very death of the cross itself God’s victory over all that would put an end to Christ’s cause, and the conquest of death itself—is a peace adequate for any exigency that you or I will ever be called upon to face. On that cross, divine mercy triumphed; by the Suffering Servant our debt was paid.

Abba, Father—literally, in Aramaic, Daddy—has his eye on the cradle of his children. When we cry in the night, a nail-pierced hand beckons us not to worry. “My peace I give you,” said Jesus. “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

“Why do you worry?”

Carl F. H. Henry was editor of Christianity Today for 12 years and is the author of more than 40 books, including the six-volume God, Revelation, and Authority (Word).

Recently my father composed and posted a letter to his seven scattered children, a formal letter containing the sort of news that makes common relationships suddenly formal, that strikes life itself with a grave formality and contemplation.

I read the letter. I learned his news. I did not deny the news, but allowed myself to experience it. I suffered the news to consume me with its implications. And in the end—precisely because of that news—I realized what a genuine, holy, consoling gift my father had been bequeathing me all the days of my life, though I had not known the gift nor its perdurable power until that letter, this news, and this, the forty-third year of my maturity.

My father had been setting me free.

He is nearly 70. Threescore years and ten. He is “Walter,” as was his father before him—as am I, the oldest of his children. And I sign myself a “junior” always, in every public place, to honor our common name. “There are two of us,” I say with my signature. “When you see me, you see evidence of him; and I shall, however long he lives, however long I live thereafter, be his junior.”

When he was much younger he used to brush his hair into a peculiar swirl at the peak of his forehead—a brown cone fixed front like a miner’s lamp. For me that swirl was as needful and as comforting as a nightlight, because it was ever the first sign of my father’s presence. There were summer afternoons when he would take me shopping, when I would lose myself among the comic books, lose all sense of time, and then look up to find my father gone. My heart would begin to buzz like a bee in a bottle and my limbs go limp with panic. I would stare down the aisles of the alien store, struggling not to cry. I would scan the top of the crowd, the heads of the shoppers—their hair.

There were Sunday evenings when my mother and I would drive to the airport to meet my father after a week away, when we would pass down long halls loud with belligerent sound, bright with a bloodless, fluorescent light, brutal with herds of stampeding strangers, and I would diminish in such an unfamiliar place. I would grow smaller and smaller and ever more fearful—until my mother squeezed my hand the harder and whispered, “There. There he is. There’s Dad.” And then I would stand tiptoe and scan the top of the crowd, the heads, searching for that peculiar swirl of hair.

When suddenly I recognized it (five miles away), the whole world changed in an instant, became kindly and familiar, and I would let go my mother’s hand and run.

The sight of my father’s curl set me free in an airport. Or I would race up the aisles of strange department stores, as bold as any citizen, because I had seen the sign of my father. That cone of hair consoled me, that looping curl alone. Where it was, he was. Where he was, I was home.

But in the years of my childhood my father was often gone indeed. He traveled for days and weeks at a time—and then I knew the intensity of my longing for him by an odd trick of the air of our house, a trick I fell for every time. His study lied to me, and I believed the lie. Whether he was working at his desk, or whether he was absent altogether, Dad kept the door to his study closed; that, perhaps, abetted my deception.

I would be involved in some common thing, playing in the living room, descending the staircase that ended at his study door, eating lunch as blithe as a child, and busy. It would be morning and sunlit. The house would be murmuring sounds of active contentment, I unconscious at my business—when all at once, as clear as a radio, I heard my name called: “Wally!” This was my father’s voice. It came directly from his study. It named me just once—“Wally!”—as though he needed me. And I would rise without another thought but that my dad had called. I ran.

I thumped the study door and entered the room, and found it empty. Always, the room was terribly neat and terribly still and vacant. But someone had called me in my father’s voice. No, no one had called me. I would stand in front of his desk, adjusting to the silence, and like a pragmatic adult would school myself in the truth that, no, my father was gone. My father was traveling. Something else—the study, the air, or my own desire—deceived me. Nobody had called my name. Merely: I missed him.

We lived in an enormous house, in those days, as dark in its depths as a cave.

But on another day my mother would say, “Dad’s coming home today,” and that day would snap into a perfect pattern, and I had a job to do.

“When is he coming?”

“I don’t know, Wally. This afternoon.”

In fact, the time didn’t matter. On such a day, the whole day through, I would enact my infant loyalty, my absolute faith in my father, my love, and my reason for being.

Straight from breakfast I shot outside to the street in front of our house and took up a position on the curb, from which I could keep the length of the street in surveillance. I sat, and I stayed there. I stayed there while the sun went from my back to the front of me. I stayed there full of happiness and hope, stayed there like a junior gargoyle fixed to the concrete. And this is what I did: I grinned and waved at every car that passed—but watched for one in particular.

I gathered bouquets of waves in return: all the world must have known who drove not far behind. I classified the various kinds of waves that humans could produce. I showed an astonished patience, but that came of the faith that Dad was on his way in a green Chevy station wagon; and until that car turned onto Reeves Drive, I was content to be nowhere but there, where I would be the first to see him.

When it did, finally, nose underneath the gracious trees, the reflections of leaves slipping up its windshield, neither patience nor chains could keep me seated, but I leaped and ran into the street and peered through the coming window and recognized among the leaves that signal swirl of hair and then the smiling face below, and I was glad. Dad was home.

Silly memories. A boy clasping his hands like prayer and bowing and laughing in the middle of the street. A boy like exhaust smoke trailing a Chevy up the driveway. A boy demanding that his father immediately be seated in a chair at a desk, that the boy might only gaze on him in that place, and on his hair.

Foolish memories.

Dad and I are older now, the both of us. My sisters and brothers, his children, are so far scattered round the world that he had to send his formal letter to the Sudan in Africa and to Tombstone, Arizona; to Denver in Colorado and Clearwater, Florida, and here, to Evansville, Indiana, the house on the corner of Chandler and Bedford.

He is threescore years and ten. Not so old, though, that he no longer works. On Sundays my father still preaches in rural congregations that lack their own pastors. Do they know the treasure they are getting? He brings to these little parishes the garnered wisdom of a long career; for he has been, in his time, a college president, an editor of Christian educational books, a professor of theology, the founder of a liberal arts college in Hong Kong, a pastor. Do they know the gift he offers them? Well, I think so. Because all his wisdom, all his experience is nothing without the thing that sustained his career from the beginning, the thing he gave his son even in the early days. About this thing my father has never been coy or secretive.

He brings to the little parishes his core self, his holy, sweet stability—his faith. They cannot mistake it. Perhaps he uses a different language now than he did in the past. Long experience will surely enrich the words. And perhaps, since the people he preaches to are farmers and ranchers, while I was just a kid when I listened, I wouldn’t recognize the images of his present homiletics. But I would certainly recognize the flash in his eye and the intensity of his tone—just as the farmers see the flash and the ranchers hear the tone. Because this thing remains the same today as first I saw it in his fatherhood and in my childhood: that he trusts absolutely in the Cross of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness and the promise of that Cross. This caused his career in the first place. This he gave to me. And this he brings to 30 people in a rural pew with as much commitment, dash, and preparation as though they were 3,000 in an auditorium: Liberty!

He brings them his faith.

What he no longer brings is the swirl of hair by which his son once spied him in a crowd. He has developed a very high forehead, now; and the few hairs left above it he combs straight back. They are white. And the sides of his head, they are snow white.

In his formal letter to the seven scattered children, my father wrote that he had passed a kidney stone; that the physician was moved, in this event, to examine other parts of his person; that his prostate gland was found to be enlarged; and that a biopsy of the gland revealed a malignancy. Dad has cancer of the prostate.

What, then, shall I do? Shall I in any manner deny my father’s age? Shall I assume the sunny disposition that asserts with grim grins only good things, nothing bad? All Will Be Well. You’ll be fine, Dad. This is an easy cancer to treat. I can name a happy host of men who lived years and years behind this piddling sort of tumor. You will not die. You will never die. My father shall never not come home again. Shall I prison myself in even the kindly lie?

What shall I do? Shall I shrink from the specter that promises to turn me into a little child again? Shall I shrink from death? From the certainty of my father’s death—and the possibility, now, that it could be sooner than later?

Even at this distance, death makes me the boy who heard his name called from an empty study: “Wally!” I need you. I will run into his room, but he won’t be there and his desk will be too terribly neat. Death makes me a curb sitter, a watcher on the street forever, waving at every car that passes, except the one that isn’t coming. What shall I do? Shall I reject these feelings and deny the incipient stabs of missing him? Shall I turn away from the truth of my father’s present condition, and the truth of my father’s future, soon or late? Well, if I do that, I turn away from my father as well, since this is who he is now. I divorce me from him. I prison out love in my own deceptions, and I become for him a fraud, no healer and no help at all.

Then what shall I do?

Why, now, when death has taken a face and found a foothold in his body—now especially—I will invoke the gift my father has given me all along. I will act in liberty, free from the need to lie, free from fear. I will myself benefit from my father’s abiding, unhidden faith in the promises of Christ: that is his chiefest gift to me, most practical right now, empowering me to benefit him.

For 43 years, consciously or not—it doesn’t matter—my father has been preparing me for this crisis; and it is right to plead with every Christian parent: Please, never make a secret of your faith! For the sake of your children, against the day when you will surely die, in order to transfigure then their grief into something more healing than destroying, assure them with cheerful conviction, even in the good, green days of their childhood, that you live and you shall die in the arms of Jesus, in whose love is life and everlasting life. Let them know that you know. Your knowledge shall be their precious gift. Their freedom.

Walter Wangerin, Senior, clings like an infant, simple and unashamed, to Jesus Christ. Walter Wangerin, Junior, has always known that. For the son, then, there are no final terrors in his father’s death, and he may gaze at the approach with clear eyes, undeceived and undenying. This is the gift, revealed in my reaction to a formal letter. The son need not shrink backward, but may companion his father even in this trip—to the door if not through the door.

All my father’s wisdom falls away, all his successes and his accolades. His long career becomes a dust, none of it a consolation now. And the swirl of hair is gone; it cannot comfort me. He is reduced, whenever his end shall come, whether sooner or later, to the flash in his eye, the intensity of his tone, and the joy with which he looks to meeting Jesus face to face. This excites him still: that God will touch the tears from his cheeks. This faith endures. This is the sign of my father now, infinitely kinder than a looping curl of hair.

I believe his believing. If his dying doesn’t destroy him, it doesn’t destroy me either. If it is for him a beginning, it can be for me a passage and a patience. I can sit on the curb a long, long time. I can sit till the kingdom itself turns onto Reeves Drive in the shape of a Chevy. Hope keeps me there. Hope has a marvelous staying power.

I don’t mean, in any of this, to sound unrealistic: I will mourn my father when he dies. I will miss him grievously, and the empty air will wound me, calling “Wally!” when no one is there. I will cry. I know how to cry. But I will not grieve as those who have no hope, which is the killing grief, which is despair.

And this is the evidence of our common, hopeful, liberating faith: that I am writing to you now, my father, my senior, this letter fully as formal as the letter you sent to us, fully as honest and unafraid as yours. On behalf of the seven scattered round the world, I send you our thanksgiving. Whenever it must be, dear Father, go in peace. You leave behind a tremendous inheritance, and sons and daughters still unscarred. Go, Dad. We will surely follow after you.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., is the author of the award-winning novel The Book of the Dun Cow (Harper & Row). His latest books include As for Me and My House (Thomas Nelson) and a collection of poetry, The Miniature Cathedral (Harper & Row).

I recently attended a conference at which Christian “senior leaders” discussed what would be their legacy to a younger generation. White-haired gentlemen greeted each other with backslaps; they had known one another for a long time, or at least had read each other’s books.

Many of these men still led sizable institutions. Yet they did not act like a small club trying to hold on to dwindling power. They spoke keenly of the demands of our times, and seemed anxious that a younger generation be empowered to tackle them. “Whether we like to admit it or not,” several said, “our day is coming to a close.”

Such magnanimity often characterizes the elderly. In my own church, seniors are among the fiercest in insisting that we have an outstanding youth program. As they put it, “The young are the future of the church.”

While admiring this generosity, I believe it has become dangerous—an old virtue out of place in these new times. For it assumes that the world belongs to the young, and that the elderly may (and should) retire into the background.

Yet America increasingly belongs to the old. Those white-haired leaders, ready to retire into the pleasures of travel and golf, are far from finished. In 1933, when the new Social Security Administration set the age of retirement at 65, most 65-year-olds were within a handful of years of death. Now, 65 is quite young. The average American, retiring at 63, has between 15 and 20 years of good health ahead. If seniors opt out of the challenges of the coming century, if they retire into senior hedonism and toss away a quarter of their adult life, we will lose our wisest, most experienced leaders before their time.

And if the church neglects the elderly, overlooking their needs and their potential because we are so used to focusing on young families, we will miss a key opportunity. In a rapidly increasing sense, the old are our future.

Nearing The Peak

Today about 11 percent of Americans are over 65. That proportion will gradually rise over the next 15 years, and take a big jump when the baby boomers start turning 65, in 2010. Meanwhile, Americans have not been reproducing at a rate that would replace themselves. Ultimately, the proportion of seniors should peak between 18 percent and 22 percent—about double what it is today.

Many churches are already there. James Ellor, professor of human services at Chicago’s National College of Education, has found that in any given American community, church attendance will include about 10 percent more elderly than the community at large; thus, if a certain town has the national average of 11 percent over 65, its churches will be about 21 percent elderly.

The mainline denominations particularly confront aging membership. About one-quarter of Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Methodists are over 65, and about half are over 50. These denominations are consequently doing the most to organize ministry with the elderly. A Methodist seminary, Saint Paul’s in Kansas City, has the nation’s first endowed chair of gerontology at a seminary. The professor, David Oliver, says that some of his students will have ministry experiences in rural churches where 100 percent of the congregation is over 65. There are some churches in the Sun Belt, ministering to retirement communities, that are also overwhelmingly made up of the elderly.

Crises And Miracles

The aging of America will pose national crises of two kinds. The most obvious is financial. The twin miracles of social security and Medicare, combined with huge tax breaks for pension plans, have made older citizens better off than the population at large. A significant minority remain tragically poor, without even the theoretical possibility of working their way out of poverty. But 20 years ago the elderly were poor as a group. Now they are, by some measures, the wealthiest sector of America. The difference is almost entirely due to government spending. Let no one say that you cannot solve poverty by throwing money at it. We did.

This huge cash transfer was almost painless because it coincided with the coming of age of the baby boom. A rapidly expanding labor force made it possible to spread the increasing cost over a growing pool of workers. Now, however, the field has begun to reverse itself. When the baby boomers hit 65, something will have to give. It is projected that payroll taxes for social security would reach 25 to 30 percent just to maintain the current level of benefits. This could provoke a major crisis—perhaps even a conflict between the generations.

But another, subtler crisis could come: a crisis of national self-image. Americans have seen themselves as idealists—the “city on a hill” image—and as pragmatists—the “can-do” image. It would be difficult, given our current way of thinking, to associate either image with a nation dominated by retirees.

We have seen how the baby boomers skewed the thinking of the nation toward each generation they were passing through: toward family life when they were children in the fifties, toward idealistic protest when college students in the late sixties, toward economics and entrepreneurialism when young workers in the eighties. Toward what will this lean when they are retired? Golf? It is hard to imagine, today, that an old America will find it easy to think proudly of itself, or to feel purposeful. We will need a better interpretation of what it means to be old.

The church should lead in this reinterpretation. But right now it is part of the problem. Carol Pierskalla, who heads senior programs at American Baptist headquarters, complains, “I hear pastors say, ‘What can I do with this church? I look out and see that all the heads are gray.’ It’s that kind of ageism that will do us in.”

Fortunately for us, that kind of ageism is not found in Scripture, not in one single verse. We have a source of guidance to help us change our thinking.

The Church’s Response

How should the church respond to the aging of America? No doubt Christian bodies will have some voice in shaping national policies, in building better housing, in making government bureaucracies responsive. But the church’s major role must surely be the one it has always done best: interpreting and embodying the true meaning of life through Jesus Christ.

Aging in modern America has two distinct characteristics. First, for the majority, it is leisure: premature and long years of leisure by the standards of all earlier eras. (Seniors may be very busy, but they usually have considerable choice in how they spend their time.) Then, for at least a large minority, aging is distinctively loss, usually gradual and cumulative over as much as a decade. And unlike Horatio Alger, unlike Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, unlike refugees from war-torn Germany, these losers will never make a new start.

As aging is both leisure and loss, so the church’s response must be in two kinds. First, older Christians must make something purposeful of this long stretch of life called retirement. Second, older Christians must find meaning and spiritual growth through the losses that often accompany their last years on Earth. These responses are essential if we are to reclaim the biblical idea of old age as a blessing (Exod. 20:12; Job 12:12).

While many church programs begin by concentrating on ministry to the dependent elderly—the homebound or those in convalescent hospitals—there is increasing recognition that most of those over 65 are hale and hearty.

Church ministries specially designed for the “young old” typically involve Sunday school classes, a midweek luncheon or Bible study, educational trips, and retreats. These programs may appear to be like entertainment-oriented youth programs; but they fill an especially important role in the life of seniors. Aging people often find their circle of human contact limited by the fact that they no longer work, that they are less able or motivated to get out, and that their circle of friends has begun to die off. Social contact is a vital need.

But few people involved in seniors ministry are content to provide only social programs. Says David Oliver of Saint Paul’s Seminary, “When I first came here everybody was talking about ministry to the aging. Now it’s shifted to ministry with. I’m thinking maybe we need ministry from. They probably can teach us more about our faith than anybody. Who else has been in relationship with God longer?” Adds Pat Parker, who ministers to older adults at Pennsylvania’s Drexel Hill Baptist Church, “It’s the retired in our churches who have the time to give to the community. I get really upset with pastors who say, ‘Oh, my congregation is all gray-headed.’ That’s where your money is, that’s where your energy is. Young people have energy, but we don’t have it to give to the church.”

The most common way of using retired people in the church is to involve them with ministry to those still older than they—to visiting the homebound, for instance. Presbyterians have launched the “Gift of a Lifetime,” a kind of VISTA program in which retired people volunteer two years to go to another church and develop ministry to the elderly. “Part of the issue is a call to older people, ‘What does the Lord require of you?’ ” says Thomas Robb of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office on Aging. Adds psychologist Coleen Zabriskie, “I don’t see any permission in Scripture for us to retire from serving the Lord.”

Others emphasize that the elderly should not merely minister to one another; they see intergenerational programs as crucial for breaking down the age-biased thinking of old and young alike. Harold Hinrichs, director for Family Life and Aging of the American Lutheran Church (now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), suggests that “One of the main gifts of the elderly, spiritually, is reminiscence. They don’t need to reminisce just with older people but with younger.”

His main emphasis has been to bring the generations together in worshiping communities—small sharing groups that follow a carefully structured weekly program for celebrating the Eucharist together. Other churches organize “Adopt-a-grandparent” programs, or send youth groups to interview older church members.

Not only do the elderly have great potential to serve, they have greater availability for spiritual development. Ed Powers, a gerontologist at Iowa State University, says, “Now you can say, ‘We’re going to get together two nights a week,’ and nobody says, ‘We need babysitters.’ We don’t have people saying, ‘I can’t do that because I work until 7:00.’ The opportunity exists for servanthood and spiritual development on a scale that we have not envisioned.”

Yet it is often the old who disqualify themselves. “There are two barriers I’ve seen from the start,” says David Jobe, pastor for senior adult ministries at First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California. “One is, ‘I won’t get involved because I’ve done my part.’ The other is, ‘I can’t. I couldn’t do that, I’m too old for that.’ ”

“Often older people pull back in retirement and rest,” notes Janine Tartaglia, of Pasadena’s First Nazarene Church. “That’s okay. There’s a place for rest. We need to retreat. But we need to remember that we shouldn’t go into retreat forever.” She recommends that churches help people plan in advance what they want to accomplish during retirement.

Many pastors to the elderly also encourage retirees to plan for their own death or disablement. Not only is there great practical value in thinking through funerals, wills, and the degree of medical intervention they wish in the event of a serious disease. The planning process may also deepen spiritual growth, as the older Christian confronts the losses that will occur.

All But Forgotten

If the “young old” should be challenged with their potential for service, the “old old” (those over 85) challenge the younger church to serve them. When people become homebound, or even unable to talk intelligibly, do they remain members of Christ’s body? In many churches they are all but forgotten.

Serving the homebound means opening avenues for them to continue a life of service, through prayer, through the telephone, through the mail, through routine tasks that can be done at home. One of the worst parts of being homebound is a sense of uselessness and isolation. James Ellor says, “When people are no longer able to participate in worship there is a period of withdrawal, of real unhappiness.” He notes that many find a “functional equivalent” in the electronic church, and suggests church leaders should recognize and even offer counsel about this through a list of preferred TV programs.

Pat Parker emphasizes the church’s responsibility to stay in touch. “I hear them saying, ‘I gave my life to the church. Was it worth it? Now when I expect some return, where is it?’ ” Janet Yancey, who runs an inner-city seniors program at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Church, notes, “There’s no bang for the bucks when you’re working with older people. Some would say the best you can expect is that they’re going to die. Young people have great potential. They’re going to be missionaries. They’ll earn money and pour it into our program. Old people are going to get crabbier and sicker. But God’s command to me is not to put my money where there is a big bang. His command is to visit the homeless and the widow.”

Programs involving the “old old” tend to meet very practical needs. Many churches sponsor convalescent home visitation and worship services, and give home Communion. Some churches attempt to keep in touch with members through volunteer visiting or telephoning teams, who can touch base on at least a weekly basis. Often tapes of Sunday services are hand-carried to elderly members, and at least one church has used taped “calls to worship” from homebound members to begin Sunday worship. James Ellor cites a church that organizes one-on-one Bible studies in the homes of the homebound.

Other churches work to provide “Meals on Wheels,” transportation, or escort services. Says Yancey, who uses 25 church volunteers in a Homebound Elderly Program, “They need someone to take them to the bank. They’re not steady on their feet, they’re nervous, they’re not used to being out there. They don’t want someone to do it for them. They want help—for balancing their checkbook, grocery shopping, going to the doctor, paying bills. We must build programs to meet their needs. They may not need another Bible class.”

Carol Pierskalla of the American Baptists says, “If you were to sink your money into one thing, I think it should be having a member of staff who knows what services are available.” Her comment reflects the confusing and overlapping bureaucracy of social welfare agencies that offer benefits to the elderly—everything from adult day-care centers to home-nursing care. Most agencies are understaffed and it takes considerable persistence to find out just what is available. Pastors can function as part-time social workers, guiding families through the maze of options, but most find it difficult to stay abreast of rapid changes.

Usually the children of the elderly are involved in decisions, sometimes from a distance. They need spiritual counsel and support; guilt is an abiding theme. Pierskalla relates, “People say to me, ‘What if I go to church and people ask me, “Where’s your mother-in-law?” and I say, “I put her in a nursing home”?’ One woman said to me, ‘The deacons came to visit my mother-in-law, but they never came to visit me, and I was desperate.’ ”

Old Age As Blessing

Our challenge is to understand old age as something good. That means treasuring and caring for those whose ability to contribute or attend church is diminished. That means considering a congregation that has grown predominantly old as full of opportunity and hope. That means seeing seniors as people with great potential for ministering to others. That means building a spirituality that incorporates loss—what Eugene Bianchi in Aging as a Spiritual Journey calls “growth through diminishment.” For seniors, problems don’t go away; they usually grow larger while the individual grows weaker. We need to articulate a spiritual life where loss is not a total loss, but part of God’s pattern of loving kindness.

It may also mean, especially in rural or urban areas, reconfiguring our image of evangelism and church growth. James Ellor describes a church on the west side of Chicago that has a nursery filled with practically antique toys. “Everything is in its place, which is a bad thing to say about a nursery. It means nobody is using it.” The congregation, he says, has come to see that nursery as a symbol of what is hopelessly wrong with it: there are no young people to fill it with children. “If you ask the elderly how to make a church grow, they’ll say bring in the young.” But there are very few young people left in the neighborhood.

Ellor is not so sure the old members are right. “Maybe they need to have a sale and get rid of those antique toys. Maybe they should use the proceeds to put in a senior center. What is wrong with reaching out to widows?” In the decades ahead, more and more churches will need to ask that kind of question.

The cover headline said it all: “Whatever Happened to Ethics?” In that one phrase Newsweek captured the black mood of a nation that in the past year suffered a Wall Street financial scandal, a covert political operation built on systematic disinformation, studies detailing the effect of the public schools’ failure to teach values, arguments over the role of judges as shapers of the laws rather than impartial jurists, and televangelists whose financial and sexual greed startled believers and unbelievers alike. At the heart of all the problems, everyone agrees, is one of the worst ethical crises ever experienced in this country.

The black mood persists despite many good proposals for reform. Business leaders recommend tighter laws and closer supervision of maverick profiteers. Seminars and courses on business ethics have taken on heretofore unheard-of importance. Educators like Allen Bloom advocate a change in educational philosophy and technique. Jurists judge that we should return to the more pure intent of the founders of our country. Religion experts busily write new ethical codes and accountability procedures. Politicians vote for better, more honest politicians—like themselves, presumably. There is no shortage of new, improved programs to restore some semblance of ethical sanity to a nation neurotically bent on being dishonest.

So why don’t we feel better? Even though these reforms have value, an underlying cynicism persists. Many wonder if any of them have the turn-the-corner potential of reestablishing our ethical rigor.

Moral Archaeology

Perhaps we are missing something obvious. New laws and new leaders are fine. But to draft regulations and select leaders we need a wider perspective than we are currently taking. We need to move beyond the quest for new tools to fix the problem.

Newspapers recently carried accounts of the Greek navy’s attempts to duplicate the remarkable shipbuilding technology used by the ancient Athenians, who dominated the seas during the golden age of Greece. They built ships (called triremes for the three rows of oarsmen who propelled them) so light, fast, and maneuverable that in 480 B.C., 400 of their ships defeated 1,000 Persian ships in a naval battle that established Athenian dominance of the known world.

Unfortunately, no triremes exist to study. The only evidences we have are archaeological remains of the sheds that housed the ships, slipways that define their length and width, and remains of pottery, granite reliefs, and other pictorial representations of the vessels. Naval inventories and classical literature provide sketchy descriptions of the number of rowers, battle strategies, and other tiny details that add pieces to the puzzle, all of which are important to the total picture. “Change any factor very much,” says one of the researchers, “and the results of the calculations tell you the thing will come apart or function inefficiently.”

Our current search for lasting ethical moorings should duplicate, in many ways, the archaeologists’ quest to rebuild the trireme. We need to do moral archaeology. Our golden age is described in the Genesis accounts of Creation, our golden rule for reclaiming at least part of that purity in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

But the Garden of Eden exists no longer. We have no extant pockets of Adamic purity. We can only look at the “archaeological” evidence for clues.

Fortunately, we have more than the Greek shipbuilders have. We have explicit directions in the Bible. We have stories of human models—“saints” some call them—who came closer than the rest of us to achieving holiness. We have within each of us remnants of an inclination to choose the good. Adam’s sin horribly defaced that desire, so much so that only with the help of the Holy Spirit’s discerning power can we detect its presence. And we have the perfect example of Jesus, who drew all these resources together in his life and teachings.

Moral Creation

For many reasons, though, we have made ourselves blind to these key resources, indeed to the fundamental truth that it is to them we must look for our model. Instead of moral archaeology, we seem intent on engaging in moral creation. We look to a growing collection of social scientific insights for our models as if we are engaged in a quest for helping God perfect our moral nature.

Of course, better laws, better judges, and better educational philosophies will help. But the reason we don’t have confidence in them, the reason for our cynicism bordering on despair, is that we realize (perhaps only subconsciously) that we have cut these good things off from their proper root—God and his perfect intentions for us. We seem intent on growing huge oak trees in clouds instead of the soil of Scripture.

Man-centered optimism, of course, will be with us always. The modern experiment of trying to base ethics on the shifting needs of man alone has produced world wars, genocides, and failed social programs. It should not surprise us that Newsweek raises the question and then cannot provide any confidence-building answers. In fact, we should be grateful that at least the situation has been traced to its fundamental ethical root. C. S. Lewis noted in Mere Christianity that the truths of Christianity do not make any sense unless you start with the premise that something is wrong. Never before have even the secular elements of our nation been so aware that something is drastically wrong. That gives us a golden opportunity to present the gospel.

But there is also a danger, and it is this: If we join in the mad chase after modern answers without basing our wisdom on the fundamentals of our faith, we are guilty of a far more serious sin than the godless. To raise the question and say we no longer seem to have the tools to solve the problem is one thing. But to give religious sanction and endorsem*nt to tools as if they were the final answer is far more dangerous. Especially when we do have answers.

What is the answer to reclaiming lost innocence? The Bible tells us how it happened (Genesis), what God has done to help us recover (by sending us a chosen people and a Chosen One), and what the future holds (biblical prophecy).

What is the answer to perverted desire and lack of will to do right? The Bible tells stories of hundreds of others just like us and gives us the promise and power of the Holy Spirit to help us rediscover and implement our God-fellowshiping heritage.

What is the answer to lost moral skills? The Bible teaches them in Exodus 20 (the Ten Commandments), Matthew 5 (the Sermon on the Mount), and 1 Corinthians (reconciling old law to new grace).

New programs built on anything less than these fundamental truths are doomed to fail. A church unwilling to do the moral archaeology required to lay the foundations—indeed, required to utilize the great modern insights of philosophy, sociology, and psychology—is abrogating its responsibility. Indeed, it is doing far worse. It makes itself part of an inexorable slide toward paganism and decadence.

By Terry Muck.

Unless evangelical Christians learn from their 1986 political mistakes, 1988 could be their electoral Armageddon. And instead of blaming the press or other outside forces for the string of political election defeats, Christians need to examine their own propensity toward self-inflicted wounds. Christians lose at the polls for the same reason other candidates lose: They do not campaign intelligently.

Part of the problem, ironically, comes from our success. In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter would never have been elected President had he not garnered 56 percent of the evangelical vote. But once we discovered our power, we began to think an evangelical on the ballot would automatically bring out the born-again voting bloc. It just doesn’t work that way, as we learned in the ill-fated 1986 elections.

Questionable Tactics

It does not help much when Christian candidates seldom reach beyond the pew during their campaigns, framing issues in language that the broader constituency cannot understand. For example, in 1986 incumbent Congressman Mark Siljander of Michigan sent a tape to evangelical pastors in his district urging them to “break the back of Satan” and to repel the attacks against him. Predictably, Siljander’s opponent strongly objected to being compared with Satan, which, of course, was not Siljander’s intent. Nonetheless, the die was cast. Siljander himself conceded “… the tape did it.”

In that same election year, North Carolina incumbent Congressman Bill Cobey mailed a campaign letter exhorting fellow Christians to send him back to Congress “so our voice will not be silenced and then replaced by someone who is not willing to take a strong stand for the principles outlined in the word of God.”

Cobey’s phrases—politically risky against any foe—hurt his campaign even more since most voters did not understand his Christian terminology. In addition, his opponent was an active Southern Baptist with a divinity degree. Cobey’s opponent demanded an apology and got one. However, the damage proved irreparable.

It is little wonder, then, that Christians get filleted by the media and rejected by the electorate. Such mistakes not only discredit the gospel, but chase away potential voters.

On the other hand, Christians who ride more on political savvy than religious affiliation stand a better chance of being taken seriously. Oregon candidate Joe Lutz enlisted as many as 10,000 volunteers to help him nearly topple a respected 18-year senatorial incumbent. How? In addition to motivating evangelicals, Lutz made an effort to reach beyond his natural support among Christians and prolife activists.

Christians need to realize the political process is not a tool to evangelize the world.

As a result, ABC’S veteran political commentator Hal Bruno observed, “Here’s one conservative who happens to be a Christian rather than vice-versa.”

Beyond Ideology

My point is that we must look for substance along with ideology and then speak to those issues that concern more than Christians. Biblical heroes like Daniel, Joseph, Nehemiah, Esther, and Deborah were raised to positions of power, influence, and authority not simply because they were God’s people, but because they had something to offer the entire society. “When the righteous triumph, the people rejoice” (Prov. 29:2).

But to elect sound candidates, Christians need to understand the political process better. It is not a tool to evangelize the world, but a vehicle for bringing sound leaders into positions of responsibility in government.

Certainly Christians need to register and vote. In 1986, only 35.2 percent of the eligible electorate voted in the nation’s Senate races—the lowest turnout since World War II. Such a small turnout favors candidates with a small constituency, often allowing narrow ideological groups to overly influence candidates, as they did with Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. Even now, churches can mobilize their members to make sure they are registered for next fall’s elections.

Beyond that, Christians must be willing to form coalitions with others who support moral (not necessarily Christian) candidates. And it seems unwise to push a Christian into a race when a capable candidate—one who is sensitive to moral and religious issues—is already entered.

It is to be hoped that 1988 will not be the final chapter in an evangelical electoral resurrection. The movement has far from crested. It remains to be seen, however, if evangelical Christians can continue to be an effective force in America’s electoral process. If they are to be, they must do more than appeal to their own constituency.

By Bruce Hallman, communications consultant to Oregon Republican senatorial candidate Joe Lutz in 1986, and currently a political consultant in Washington, D.C.

SPEAKING OUT offers responsible Christians a forum. It does not necessarily reflect the views of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.