Tom Sine
The highly effective (and visible) ministry of England’s Evangelical Alliance.
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Promiscuity is genetic,” exclaimed the Anglican bishop of Edinburgh on British television. The bbc immediately contacted Clive Calver, general director of the Evangelical Alliance, for an evangelical response. Calver was clear and direct: “Perhaps there is also a rape gene and a murder gene. What are the societal consequences of such an unfounded claim? The Bible teaches that God has given us moral choice and we are responsible for our behavior.”
As he told me this story in his office, Calver sat forward suddenly, his dark eyes flashing. “We have to address an enormous range of issues, from euthanasia and the global arms trade to miracles and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. There has been a remarkable increase of interest in evangelical opinion in Britain in the last few years. This growing demand is, frankly, taxing me and the resources of the Evangelical Alliance to the absolute limits!”
The demands on the alliance will very likely increase in the coming years. How the ea is already handling these demands is instructive to American evangelicals.
Evangelicals with a differenceLike our British counterparts, American Christians want to influence our society. But in the United States, unlike Britain, an increasingly inflamed culture war is dividing both church and society. The church in America is often much more seriously divided by politics than theology.
One cannot be considered an evangelical Christian in many circles within the U.S. if one is not a conservative Republican. Nowhere else in the English-speaking West—Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada—does one have to be the equivalent of a conservative Republican to be considered a born-again Christian. This is a uniquely American phenomenon. When the British evangelicals do get involved politically, it is usually in a nonpartisan and irenic manner.
The Evangelical Alliance is the largest Christian organization in Great Britain, representing 1.3 million Christians from 30 denominations and over 800 Christian organizations. The ea celebrated its 150th anniversary last month with an event to which 4,000 Christian leaders from Great Britain and elsewhere were invited.
That was thenIt was a very different world when EA was founded in 1846. Queen Victoria was 27 years of age, and the potato famine was devastating Ireland. Originally the alliance was to become the first world alliance of evangelicals. At the organizing meeting, held in August 1846, evangelicals came from Britain, continental Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. However, when a representative from the Baptist Union proposed that slave holders be denied admission to membership, the American delegation protested, and the alliance fractured. Instead of a worldwide organization, they settled for a loosely linked network of national organizations not accountable to one another.
The initial emphasis of the Evangelical Alliance in Britain, still strong today, was religious liberty. In subsequent years, through tough times and good times, the alliance has emphasized prayer, the renewal of the church, and the advancement of the gospel. In 1951 EA joined with the National Association of Evangelicals in America in birthing the World Evangelical Fellowship. The alliance was also instrumental in inviting Billy Graham to the historic Greater London Crusade of 1954.
Over the past 15 years the church in Britain has experienced remarkable renewal and outreach into British society. The alliance, under the unifying leadership of Clive Calver, has grown significantly during this time. When Calver took over in 1983, he and his team established a two-track strategy: (1) to develop greater credibility with the larger evangelical community in the U.K. and (2) to achieve visibility and credibility with the media and political leaders in Britain.
It succeeded in building trust with evangelicals by providing leadership in an area of key concern at that time, the influence of the occult in children’s literature. ea also built bridges to the media, signaling that the archbishop of Canterbury and other Anglican leaders do not speak for all Christians in England. Over time, both the media and political leaders in Parliament were educated by the alliance about evangelical Christianity, its constituency, and views on religious, social, and political issues.
By 1988 the alliance had turned the corner. Members of the media began routinely to contact EA for its views on a broad range of issues. And the alliance became highly respected because it was nonpartisan, and it always did a thorough job of researching issues for its theological and public-policy implications.
Aims and meansThe objectives of the Evangelical Alliance today are straightforward:
—to promote unity in the church;—to stimulate prayer;—to encourage evangelism; and—to enable Christians to act as salt and light in society.
One way EA seeks to achieve these goals is to sponsor an annual event called Spring Harvest. This yearly conference attracts evangelicals from house churches, and Baptist, Methodist, and Anglican congregations, along with Pentecostals, charismatics, and many ethnic congregations. Worship and prayer are the vital core of Spring Harvest. But there is an educational component as well: leading evangelical scholars from the U.K. and beyond are tapped to educate evangelicals on the history, theology, and social implications of their faith.
This year the theme of Spring Harvest was “Faith Beyond Belief.” Over 20,000 people participated at two different sites. During one week more than £100,000 was raised to support evangelical missions.
This is nowCalver, writing on the evangelical renewal in Britain during the last 15 years, says: “Fresh styles of worship, an acceleration of church planting and new commitment to social responsibility have played their part in producing numerical increase among evangelicals in all denominations. As evangelicals have begun to depart from an inherited policy of self-imposed isolation, they have emerged from their comfortable ghettos to grapple with the needs of contemporary society.”
Addressing a Christian leadership conference in Birmingham in 1995, Calver declared, “I challenge Christians in Birmingham to get out of their church building and address the urgent and growing needs in their community.” To which a man from the audience named Cameron responded later: “I work with single-parent mums and I find them very responsive to the gospel of Christ. The only problem is that I have difficulty locating churches in our city willing to get involved in working with single parents and their kids.”
By the end of this EA-sponsored event, I had witnessed a very gratifying response to Calver’s challenge. A number of pastors and church leaders gathered with Cameron and arranged to visit his ministry; others who presented urban mission opportunities were also inundated by interested persons.
Activism with an English accentWhen Sir Fred Catherwood resigned his position as the vice president of the European Parliament, he was invited to become the president of the Evangelical Alliance. He said he would accept the position on one condition: if he could spearhead an Evangelical Social Action Network in Britain to expand and coordinate Christian outreach to those at the margins.
In his autobiography, Lord Catherwood says: “I believe we need to get together in all the major cities to form Christian action networks so that anyone in need can look to a church and be directed to help somewhere in the network.”
When the alliance’s network was publicly launched, it was welcomed by city leaders and covered by the mass media.
The Salvation Army, Scripture Union, Oasis Charitable Trust, and many churches were reaching out to drug addicts, homeless, and unemployed people long before ea ever started these new networks. But under Catherwood’s able leadership the social action networks seem to be doing a more effective job of coordinating and expanding this area of witness and service. Already social action networks are established in London, Nottingham, Sheffield, Bristol, and Worcester.
One success story involves Tracy, who lives in a part of Liverpool with a very high rate of unemployment. Like many of her peers, Tracy had not been able to find a job after she graduated from high school three years earlier. She lacked self-confidence and became withdrawn. When some Christians, concerned about growing unemployment in Liverpool, started a ministry called “Training into Jobs,” they got in touch with Tracy. They gave her job training, which boosted her self-esteem. As a consequence of their efforts, an important transformation has taken place in Tracy’s life. First they helped her get a job. She has now worked two years in the hotel industry. Most important, because of their care Tracy has committed her life to Jesus Christ. She has become fully involved in a local church and has developed enough confidence to lead a women’s group in her congregation.
Tracy is only one of over 2,000 people in Liverpool that Training into Jobs has trained and placed. Of these, 12 percent have found, like Tracy, a vital Christian faith.
When the alliance seeks to be salt and light, it enters the public arena as an agent of reconciliation. It repudiates partisan, ideological, and adversarial politics.
Calver wrote me that “The rise of the religious right … has caused grave concern here in the U.K. We have long sought to develop a partnership between those on the right and left of evangelicals … in fact our Chancellor of the Exchequer, Right Honorable Kenneth Clark, once commented to me: ‘Clive, one minute you are talking to me about social issues, the next moment on moral ones. What are you evangelicals? Are you right wing or left wing?’ My answer was that we are both!”
British evangelicals believe the gospel transcends traditional political categories. They are also working with a broader array of issues than many evangelicals in the U.S. Concerned about abortion and other family issues, they also engage world hunger, the environment, human rights, religious liberty, racism, the disabled and the poor, Sunday trading laws, and violence in videos.
The Evangelical Alliance seeks to be a prophetic witness for the gospel from outside the political order. It also insists on a scriptural foundation for public-policy advocacy. As a result, EA has joined conservatives to lobby Parliament to protect children from access to adult videos, and it has joined progressives in lobbying for greater government assistance for the disabled. Since it seeks to define its position from Scripture and conscience rather than from political ideology, it is respected on both sides of the political aisle in Parliament.
Evangelical scholarship is taken seriously by the alliance. Its sense of social responsibility is shaped by persons like Lesslie Newbigin and John Stott and thought leaders from outside England. The serious attention to evangelical scholarship may explain in part why the focus of the Evangelical Alliance is broad, its style conciliatory, and its use of Scripture foundational.
Quid pro quo?Although American evangelicals have much to learn from the Evangelical Alliance, we cannot appropriate its models completely. Our journeys are so different. Britain is an island nation in which established faith and established government are inseparably linked. As a consequence, the British media see a link between Christian faith and politics. America, on the other hand, is a frontier nation that has soughtto create a pluralistic society in which we separate church from state.
Nevertheless, British evangelicals regularly borrow from America. Models of church growth like Willow Creek Community Church, urban outreach like John Perkins’s work in community development, and charismatic renewal like the Vineyard have influenced the ministries of British evangelicals.
American evangelicals could best join in celebrating the Evangelical Alliance’s 150th anniversary by learning from it, especially its approach to public witness. Should we not allow Scripture to move us beyond partisan politics and ideology as we work for the common good? Couldn’t we be reminded by the alliance that the primary way the Bible teaches that God changes society is not through politics but by proclaiming and demonstrating the gospel of Jesus Christ? Can’t we learn from these evangelicals with a difference?
Tom Sine is author of Cease Fire: Searching for Sanity in America’s Culture Wars (Eerdmans, 1995), from which some of the material for this article was drawn. Cease Fire was included in CT’s top 25 Books of the Year for 1996.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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Ideas
Richard A. Kauffman
Bread for my neighbor is a spiritual concern.
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I come from an extended family where at one meal we already start talking about what we are going to eat at the next. That is not the experience of 800 million people today who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. If we were to think of the whole earth as a restaurant, one in seven persons is not getting served. Hunger is not just a Third World problem. According to a report released in October by Bread for the World, 20.8 percent of children in this country are poor, the highest rate of any industrialized nation.
While Jesus said that the poor (and hungry) will always be with us, we dare not misconstrue Jesus’ description of human reality as a prescription justifying inaction. For our Lord also warned that we will be judged by whether we feed the hungry and clothe the naked. The early church was known not only for its ritual breaking of bread, but also for its service to the widowed and the poor. The second-century Shepherd of Hermas worried that some Christians were overconsuming food and not sharing with the needy—signs that true repentance and community spirit were lacking.
Fortunately, many Christians today do care about world hunger. Over half of American citizens contribute to hunger-relief programs. Many of these give because they are people of faith. It is not uncommon for local congregations to run food banks, give food to homeless shelters and rescue missions, take crop walks, and fast in order to give the money saved to food-aid programs. World Vision, for instance, has created an annual 30-hour famine program for youth groups and others, scheduled in 1997 for February 21-22. (Resources are available from 30 Hour Famine, P.O. Box 70094, Tacoma, Wash. 98481.)
Christians concerned about hunger, however, must recognize that our charity may not be enough. Indeed, we have the means to produce enough food. The problem is not supply but a reliable and secure delivery system; and the poor too often lack adequate buying power.
Just as there are numerous causes for food shortages, there must be multiple strategies for meeting the needs of the hungry. Food aid must continue. But other strategies can help: the development of heartier strains of seed, education for better nutrition, land reform, safe water, an end to war and use of food as a weapon, availability of appropriate technologies, debt relief for poor countries, fair trade practices, adequate delivery systems to get food to people who cannot grow their own, and funding of development projects. Many of these strategies require public policy and government cooperation.
Governments at all levels can make a difference in eradicating hunger, Bread for the World argues, if there is the political will to do so. But for the foreseeable future, the drive to “end welfare as we know it” will only worsen the situation. The welfare system in the U.S. has failed on many fronts, but Christians who give aid for the hungry need to think seriously about supporting public policies that may make a bad situation worse. Fortunately, new opportunities are emerging for cooperation between public and private sectors, including faith-based organizations.
“Bread for myself is a material concern, but bread for my neighbor is a spiritual concern,” said Christian philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev. We might think about that when we are eating or when we have opportunity to share our resources. It is an aphorism that could also guide us in making public-policy decisions.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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Ideas
David Neff
Columnist; Contributor
Yes, the judiciary is usurping the powers of the people, but talk of revolution is alarmist.
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Bracing for charges of irresponsibility and alarmism, the editors of the conservative monthly First Things brought forth in November a five-article symposium on “The End of Democracy?”—a title they claimed was “in no way hyperbolic.” No tabloid tease there. They meant it.
The authors, a distinguished array of conservative legal theorists and political scientists, including Charles Colson and Robert Bork, argue that recent Supreme and Federal Circuit Court decisions have short-circuited the democratic process, doing an end run around the popular will in such areas as abortion, gay rights, and assisted suicide. Indeed, in the Romer case, which invalidated the express will of Colorado voters to ban gay-rights ordinances (CT News, June 17, 1996), the Supreme Court defined by fiat any disfavoring of a sexual minority as proceeding from animus (rather than principle or reason). The Court stripped the voters of their constitutional means of addressing moral problems in their midst. This left the voters of Colorado—and of every state of the Union-no recourse, no possibility of ballot initiative, referendum, or even amendment to the state constitutions. Ergo, “the end of democracy.” We no longer govern ourselves. The Court has seen to that.
The First Things authors feel this pinch keenly, recognizing that, in principle, the judicial branch of the federal government has usurped powers that belong to the people, the Congress, and the executive branch. Their analysis of the Court is cogent. But the Christian’s deeper dispute with such cases as Roe and Casey is not simply that they undemocratically bypassed the legislative process; it is that they undemocratically fail to recognize the moral equality of all persons (including the seriously or terminally ill and the unborn).
A cure worse than the disease?The remedy for all this will require vigorous action: several symposium authors called for increased resistance (sacrificial giving to prolife causes; volunteering at hospices and prolife pregnancy centers; political, legal, and educational activism; more intentional support for adoption). The remedy may also be radical: civil disobedience (refusing to pay state taxes that fund abortions; nonviolently defying unjust restrictions on freedom of speech in front of abortion clinics), and even, potentially, revolution.
Fortunately, Charles Colson made it clear that the time for rebellion is not yet, that “we dare not at present despair of America,” and that God is “in the miracle business.” Colson reviews the historic criteria for justified rebellion according to Protestant lights John Knox and Samuel Rutherford. Our government clearly has not breached the people’s trust to the point that revolution could be justified.
But perhaps talk of revolution should be out of bounds. One lesson of history is that we do not know what a revolution will bring. We can, however, be sure it will not be what we imagine. Take Poland as an example: At almost the same time First Things released its symposium, the Polish Parliament approved a broadly permissive abortion law. This, just three-and-a-half years after the young noncommunist government had passed a church-approved anti-abortion bill. This Polish reversal is about more than abortion: it is the rejection by the pervasively Catholic Polish population of their own church’s influence on their fledgling liberal democracy. A Christian revolt here would just as likely yield “wild grapes” on the other side of the revolution.
The language of civil disobedience and potential revolution, when abstracted from the coolly rational atmosphere of a thought journal like First Things, can produce worse things. When the people feel empowered in the political process, talk of the culture wars is understood metaphorically and serves to enliven debate. But for people who feel deprived of political recourse, the language of war and revolution, combined with calling the United States “the tyrant state” and an “illegitimate regime” (as this symposium did), inflames passions and prepares people for demagoguery.
Democracy, let it be noted, is a relative good. As political scientist Robert George reports in the symposium’s concluding essay, Pope John Paul II has said that democracy is “a means not an end” and its ” ‘moral value’ is not automatic.” The pope’s point is that democracies can err, yea verily, go rotten. But even under rotten regimes, the New Testament tells us, Christians are faithfully to live out their calling. Our attitude is to be one of prayerful respect, not hostility, and our lives a persuasive and self-sacrificing witness.
One Christian goal (we have many) is to maximize the democratic process when it is likely to lead to righteousness (both personal and social). Our allegiance to righteousness is absolute, but our allegiance to democracy is relative. Both Scripture and the witness of the early church testify to our responsibility to foster virtue, feed the hungry, and lift up the oppressed. Democracy, when it recognizes and protects the fundamental equality of every person, is better suited to that goal than any other system. But for the Christian, it must always find its justification in godly ends. To talk of the “End of Democracy” is to announce the arrival of an era in which it will be much more difficult to reach those godly ends. Do not read this symposium as a cloaked call to rebellion, but as a stern statement of where we now stand.
Where we stand is often spoken of as a slippery slope. That image—of an icy hill with no bumps or bushes on which society might catch itself—springs too easily to mind. But social critic Daniel Yankelovich has said that social trends do not move in straight lines of decline or ascent. He speaks rather of a “lurch-and-learn” model. Cultures and communities change by gross and ungainly reactions to new circumstances (“lurching”), and when some prophetic voice points out their overcorrection (“learning”), a new lurching begins in a new direction.
One way American democracy has found new direction in the past is through the renewal of the church. The histories of America’s Great Awakenings are marked not only by personal salvation, but by social reform of the broadest order. The Abolition movement itself owed its energy to one of these revivalist movements.
In the First Things symposium, we may hear a prophetic word that America has gone far toward moral and social chaos. What new lurching awaits us only God knows. Whatever our future, may we, as Colson urges, not despair of America, but pray that discussion of resistance and revolution remain an academic exercise.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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God at war* In their attempt to rehabilitate Israel’s warrior-God [“When God Declares War,” Oct. 28], Daniel Reid and Tremper Longman offer a curious apology: “the destruction of one’s enemies for the sake of a deity was not an exclusively Israelite notion.” In other words, Yahweh demanded human sacrifice, but so did the other deities.
This is theodicy—all the gods are doing it? This aspect of Israel’s God: the rage, the caprice, the violence—in earlier years I defended it; in recent years I dismissed it. I now appropriate it in an ironic temper: as a rebuke to myself or to any person or cause that first deifies itself and then destroys its enemies in God’s name. The authors’ attempt to link Jesus’ messianic mission, especially his crucifixion, to Israel’s holy wars is preposterous. His death in fact repudiated that program, a program, which, we may recall, belonged not to Jesus but to Judas.
-Rev. Michael E. AndersonHoly Nativity Episcopal ChurchClarendon Hills, Ill.
Provocative, profitable Bible study* I was delighted to read David Neff’s account of the Genesis discussion project [“Bill Moyers’s National Bible Study,” Oct. 28]. This fall I am coteaching a course, “Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue,” with a theology professor at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, a seminary decidedly more liberal than Bethel, an evangelical institution. Each week, 28 of us—half from each school—meet to discuss the nature of biblical authority, God, sin, salvation, and other themes (including ethical topics) central to Christian faith. As students and professors, we strive to understand and learn from one another, but we also freely disagree with and challenge one another. Both “sides” are finding the course not only provocative but also profitable. After reading Neff, I now want to do the same with Muslims, Jews, and representatives of other religions!
-Prof. Robert V. RakestrawBethel Theological SeminarySt. Paul, Minn.
I have some reservations regarding the value of Bill Moyers’s national Bible study. Genesis 3:15 refers to the coming Messiah; in fact, much of the O.T. refers to his coming. The Bible says it was written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, [so] how can you have a meaningful Bible study among groups of different beliefs, and some with none at all—at least with any confidence in the future?
-Paul J. EvansRockford, Ill.
Neff replies: Evangelicals who hold Bible studies with those of other faiths have to rely on the power of the Word itself: It never returns to God void. Helping unbelievers expose themselves to God’s self-disclosing Word is a form of evangelism that respects and relies on God’s sovereignty.
Public opinion holds no hopeIn the Colson/Pearcey column “Why Not Gay Marriage?” [Oct. 28], I certainly agree that we as Christians should be willing and able to defend our faith (including our view of marriage) in the public arena; however, there are at least two concepts that the authors ought to rethink: (1) Simply quoting the Bible in a post-Christian culture doesn’t cut any ice; and (2) the only real hope for deterring (gay marriage legislation) is through public opinion. God uses his Word with supernatural might that not only can cut ice, but can cut even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. If public opinion is our only real hope for anything, then God help us all.
-Rev. Lanny PenwellPlatteville, Wis.
Colson’s article could have as logically been written in 1950 against interracial marriages. His “complementarity model” argument would have fit well in 1930 against married couples who practiced birth control. Interfaith marriages and marriages of divorcees would have threatened his concept of “public good” in 1950 society.
Is Colson saying that the only kind of wedded life the state should allow must be the type he believes proper? With no help, heterosexuals have done a rather good job in the “disintegration of marriage.” If given the opportunity, the disenfranchised just might appreciate the institution of wedded bliss more than those who now hold the fort.
Last month, Miss Doreen Lioy married Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker currently on death row. Doreen has been in love with her man for two years. I have been in love with my man much longer. Doreen has given up family, church, home, employment, and friends to marry the love of her life, but so have I. The government allowed and assisted Ramirez, convicted of 13 torturous, sadistic murders, to legally marry in prison while he awaits death. My man and I have never had so much as a traffic ticket, yet Lioy and Ramirez get to marry, but we can’t. Our only crime is that we are gay.
-Rev. P. R. JohnsonPomona, Calif.
“Why Not Gay Marriage?” asked Charles Colson’s October 28 essay. To the many prohibitions in Scripture, and Colson’s reasoned logic, perhaps we should add these nuggets of common sense:
Physically, gay marriage is anatomically incorrect. Etymologically, the term “same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron. ‘Nough said.
-Peter KushkowskiHaddam, Conn.
A moral and spiritual crisisI was gratified to read your serious and sober critique of consumerism [“Why the Devil Takes Visa,” Oct. 7]. For years I have believed that the issues you raise represent the central moral and spiritual crisis facing Christians in this culture.
Many Christians bemoan the fractures in societal values and the health of our families. Tragically, under the sway of opportunistic political and religious leaders, we are urged to point the finger at the wrong culprits (gays and lesbians, immigrants, poor people, liberals) without realizing that our culture’s obsession with materialism and consumerism is by far the most insidious threat to healthy values. How, for instance, can a culture that finds it perfectly reasonable to pay professional athletes tens of millions of dollars have any sane grasp of values? How can parents convey meaningful values to children who are bombarded with commercials that tell them they must have the newest, most expensive tennis shoes and fashions to be acceptable?
I hope this article is a first step in an ongoing discernment of the role of money, materialism, and consumerism in U.S. society. I hope and pray more Christians realize what a fundamental challenge these issues are to our integrity and faithfulness as people of God.
-William O’Brien, Contributing EditorThe Other SidePhiladelphia, Pa.
Clapp’s anecdote about the Coca-Cola song being chosen by a group of American Christian students as a song representative of and common to our culture brought to mind the saying “Let me make the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.” I can’t help but wonder as I wander through the malls about this relentless and insatiable passion for the new. Might it not reflect an unfulfilled longing for newness of life?
-Janet Lindeblad JanzenWichita, Kans.
I feel that one important aspect was not discussed—the arts and the role of the artist in society. At a very basic level, artists produce no product that enables survival. No dance fed a hungry child, no symphony healed a disease. Yet none of us would live in a culture without music, art, dance, poetry, or liturgy. What a dull existence that would be!
Not all art is good, honorable, or of good report. But I am willing to work the extra hours, grow the extra grain, invest for higher yield so that I might have the extra money or grain to support the artist who will enrich my soul, show the glories of God’s creation, or make my cooking pot prettier.
-David G. TroutmanAustin, Tex.
With irony, consumerism provided the Pew Charitable Trust with the funds to support Rodney Clapp’s research. But perhaps they should fund a slight bit more to ensure the accuracy of quotes from John Wesley who, in addition to Clapp’s partial quote, “Get all you can, save all you can,” added “give all you can.” This eighteenth-century Oxford don lived, perhaps to Clapp’s surprise, what he taught and is hardly in the camp of those who fueled consumerism. Receiving 30 pounds sterling a year, Wesley gave away 2. Years later, when he was then earning four times that amount, he still lived on 28 pounds and gave the entire remainder away. At the end of life he bequeathed to heirs his few material possessions, consisting of a chaise, his books, a horse and—the Methodist church.
-John E. Van Valin, PublisherLight and Life CommunicationsIndianapolis, Ind.
No exclusionMichael Cromartie’s interview brought relief from my assumption that a political and social consensus exists among evangelicals that excludes me [“One Lord, One Faith, One Voice?” Oct. 7]. There is a place for me, and there are brothers and sisters to fellowship with! Call for Renewal is an answer to prayer.
-Ken McClain BuchananNevada City, Calif.
The political forum involved shared observations concerning the apparent emergence of Louis Farrakhan as the major spokesman for black Americans following the Million Man March. As a black evangelical, a Baptist pastor, and a professor at an evangelical seminary, I feel the need to respond on behalf of the millions of black men and black evangelicals in the country who do not hear or see in Louis Farrakhan a message or a model that is attractive.
I publicly opposed that march, for several reasons. I objected to the conveners: Ben Chavis because of his misappropriation of NAACP funds; Farrakhan because I refuse to follow leadership that is not Christ-centered and Christ-uplifting. I also opposed the march because it had no legislative agenda to give it focus and purpose.
Be assured that the evangelical black church is alive and well. We have no leader but Christ.
-Pastor Marvin A. McMickleAshland Theological SeminaryAshland, Ohio
As a local tax assessor and evangelical Christian, I sometimes perceive in the Religious Right’s rhetoric against big government a rhetoric against government workers that comes across as, post—Oklahoma City, a little frightening.
State and local workers in human services, corrections, and other functions across the country will bear the brunt of the front-line impact of Washington, D.C., actions. We are the people who will implement welfare reform and face the challenges of doing more with less as the federal government reallocates resources to address the deficit and our society’s changing priorities. Some of us are your Christian brothers and sisters.
As you send us fewer of your tax dollars, please reduce your irate words against us and let them be transformed into petitions to God for us. Thank you.
-Luke WalbertSt. Paul, Minn.
* Thanks for the best interview-article I have read in years. It confirms that there can be spiritual unity in spite of differences in politics. Yet, on the “major” moral issues, there seems to be unity of political values. Thanks to men like Tony Campolo, Charles Colson, and Ralph Reed, the Christian community has men of intelligence and spiritual wisdom making our voice known in our government.Rev. Michael WeyenethWaverly, Nebr.
Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address. Send to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY,465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com. Letters preceded by ” * ” were received online.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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—Urban Family magazine and its sister publication The Reconciler, started in April 1995, have combined to form a new single publication, Reconcilers, which will be supported entirely by donations rather than subscription and advertising income as before. Urban Family, the 35-year-old Jackson, Mississippi-based ministry founded by John Perkins, also has been renamed Reconcilers Fellowship, with a purpose of “inspiring and equipping God’s people for racial healing and community rebuilding.”
—The U.S. Supreme Court in October refused to hear an appeal of a Minnesota lower court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit against the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America‘s pension fund investments (ct, May 15, 1995, p. 52). Thomas Basich led a group of pastors upset with the denomination for investing money in socially screened funds.
—After three years of buyout attempts, court battles, and demolitions, Back Bay Mission in Biloxi, Mississippi, is moving to make way for a casino complex. The mission sold its property for $2.2 million and was awarded $514,000 for land taken by eminent domain (CT, Feb. 5, 1996, p. 106), as well as another $25,000 for dropping its appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court. Its new property is 10 blocks away from the original site, where it has been located for 74 years.
—Grove City (Pa.) College will end participation in the Federal Stafford and Federal PLUS student loan programs at the end of the 1996-97 academic year. New college president John Moore, 61, says the college will institute a private loan program rather than be subject to federal government oversight and audits. Moore has been director of the International Institute at George Mason University and associate director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
—Many of the 25,000 people who have left the Christian Reformed Church in the past four years are expected to join United Reformed Churches in North America, a secessionist denomination formed in October in Lynwood, Illinois. The ordination of women is a leading factor in the departures.
—Questar Publishers of Sisters, Oregon, in September purchased Vision House Publishing of Gresham, Oregon, and absorbed its titles. Questar president Don Jacobson is the son-in-law of John Van Diest, who founded Vision House two years ago. Questar began in 1987.
—Ken Smitherman is the new president and chief executive officer of the Colorado Springs-based Association of Christian Schools International (ASCI). asci is the largest Christian school organization in the world, representing more than 3,600 Protestant schools in 71 countries.
—Stephen Freed, 39, is the new president and chief executive officer of International Teams/USA, a 35-year-old evangelical missions agency based in Prospect Heights, Illinois, which has 400 staff serving in 20 countries. Freed has had executive posts with Trans World Radio, Campus Crusade for Christ, and MasterWorks.
—Journalist and author Mark Silk has become the founding director of the new Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The center’s mission includes the advancement of understanding the roles that religious movements play, the exploration of challenges posed by religious pluralism, and the examination of the influence of religion on culture.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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by Kevin D. Miller in Chattanooga.
For 50 years, the unconventional Spiros Zodhiates has built amg into a worldwide evangelistic, relief, and publishing venture.
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If the name Spiros Zodhiates does not roll trippingly off the evangelical tongue, neither does the man nor his ministry fit the classic evangelical mold. This year the Greek immigrant marks his fiftieth year at the helm of amg International, but Zodhiates has yet to become a household name.
Even evangelical insiders who know him well are at a loss to characterize him. “The American Wild West gone missions,” one missiologist observes finally.
It is an apt description for this 74-year-old Cyprus-born missions maverick who across five decades built the fledgling American Mission to the Greeks into AMG International, which today undertakes publishing (Pulpit Helps and The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible), health services (with hospitals in Greece and India), “newspaper evangelism” (in 20 countries), and church planting (200 congregations in Muslim Indonesia alone).
A study in contrastsMoments after inviting me into his modestly furnished home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Zodhiates the scholar delves into the significance of an important Greek word in the New Testament, then, in the same breath, Zodhiates the evangelist declares a desire “to raise enough money to place a gospel message in Playboy.”
With an earned doctor of theology degree, Zodhiates has devoted his life to studying the Greek language and the Greek New Testament, authoring about 50 books and reference works. Working off his kitchen table, Zodhiates is focusing on his latest project, a word-by-word commentary on the Greek New Testament. He expects to labor on it for the next ten years. “This will be my biggest contribution to the Christian world,” he says, “if the Lord allows me to live that long.”
Another of Zodhiates’s proud achievements is his collection of 50,000 religious volumes. Each page of each book has been subject indexed, a project that a lone worker took 25 years to accomplish. He hands me a tome with yellowed leaves and proclaims, “Of all those books, I have reduced the two most important down to the Greek New Testament and this one.” It is a Greek concordance originally published in 1897 and last reprinted in 1957.
From these two works—and from his native Greek tongue—he is writing his word commentary, using paper and pencil.
Worldwide outreachAMG’s ministry is as varied as Zodhiates’s interests. What started as a soul-winning mission to Greeks is now a multifaceted relief and evangelistic organization that beams Christian radio broadcasts into China, runs 18 child-care centers in the Philippines, mails 6,000 Gospel of John booklets a month in Russia, sponsors and educates 7,000 children in Guatemala, and works in five leper colonies in India. It operates orphanages in Bangladesh and Albania, Christian bookstores in Australia and Spain. In addition to its churches in Indonesia, amg runs a Bible school and a newly opened seminary there.
The list of ministries runs through 50 countries and into nearly two dozen distinct ministry areas, including the mission’s trademark outreach, in which ads presenting the gospel are placed in national newspapers.
Vision-driven, rather than results-oriented, Zodhiates has never catered to the American preoccupation with meticulously credited successes, cleanly defined lines of responsibility, or, above all, measurable results.
“Why try to measure the immeasurable?” he says. “We can never know the effect of our work. The results are for God.”
Instead, this Mediterranean transplant, who after 50 years still speaks with a discernible accent, employed free-ranging methods, which, if sometimes untidy, are reminiscent of early Christian missions.
Accent on creativityThe Zodhiates approach nurtures flexibility, creativity, and ministry balance. It emphasizes reshaping the organization to fit the needs of people as well as using their professional and spiritual gifts.
Whereas other mission organizations “liked to tell where each person belonged, I didn’t,” Zodhiates says. “If you were to come to AMG someday and say, ‘I have this particular ministry in mind, and this is what I believe God is calling me to do,’ I’d shake hands with you, see what your needs are, and then try to meet them.”
The result is a ministry collaboration that has zigzagged around the globe. After coming to AMG in 1946, Zodhiates began to broadcast Scripture studies over the radio and eventually turned those expositions into books, which became the foundation of amg’s publishing arm, which last year grossed $1.6 million.
While delivering 15 tons of the Modern Greek New Testament to the island of Crete in 1949, he was approached by a barefoot girl begging for bread. Moved by the girl’s plight, Zodhiates determined that AMG needed to meet not only the spiritual needs but the physical needs of the destitute in Greece. He began raising funds to provide medicine and food for Greek children. Over the years, amg has supported children in 23 orphanages in that country.
In the 1960s, after an Orthodox priest in Greece brought Zodhiates to trial nine times on charges of proselytism, he refused to be stymied. AMG opened a new outreach to Muslims in Egypt. “My Lord was guided by the need that existed,” Zodhiates explains.
By not following all the standard ways of operating an overseas ministry, Zodhiates was sometimes ahead of his time. From the start he depended on nationals instead of Americans to do AMG’s overseas work. Even today AMG has only 15 North Americans stationed abroad. “His philosophy was that the best way to reach the locals is with the locals,” said Tasos Ioannidis, a 31-year-old Greek immigrant and MIT graduate who serves on AMG’s executive committee.
This entrepreneurial spirit also shows itself in the ways Zodhiates has found to fund his ministries. In 1966, Zodhiates felt led of the Lord to build a hospital in Thessaloniki, Greece. It took ten years to complete it, but today Saint Luke’s admits 1,300 patients a month, with its profits being channeled into AMG’s not-for-profit ministries around the world.
Zodhiates has used this approach on a personal scale as well. In the early 1950s, he borrowed money to invest in a rental property of 24 units. The venture worked, and because of its income, Zodhiates has never allowed the amg board to set his salary above $275 a week or to pay him book royalties.
When other parachurch organizations tended to settle neatly into either evangelistic outreach or relief work, amg tenaciously maintained an emphasis on both. From Zodhiates’s perspective, hospitals, feeding centers, churches in Muslim countries, and newspaper evangelism naturally grow out of each other.
The ministry to children and lepers in India, for instance, flourished when a billionaire shoe manufacturer in Germany heard Zodhiates speak at his church. He began heavily financing AMG’s work in India as well as establishing his own leprosy clinics there.
Overcoming discouragementSince a stroke two years ago, Zodhiates has frequented his office at amg less and less. The day-to-day administration is now carried on by Ioannidis, his son-in-law Paul Jenks, and two others.
But his presence is felt in every office and in every decision made. It is also present on the walls in Zodhiates’s office. One plaque reads, “I will not gratify the devil by being discouraged.”
Hanging nearby is a framed photo of Spiros with a smiling Indian boy in his arms. “The boy has leprosy,” Ioannidis told me. “The photo means a lot to Dr. Zodhiates because, when he held the boy, the boy told him, ‘You are the first person who ever hugged me.’ ” To that child, a little wildness in missions has made all the difference.
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
- More fromby Kevin D. Miller in Chattanooga.
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—Samuel M. Sherrard is the new president and chief executive officer of Youth for Christ International (YFCI). Sherrard, 55, founded Youth for Christ in Colombo in his native Sri Lanka in 1966. He became executive director of Youth for Christ in Hawaii in 1974 and YFCI Americas area director in 1994. For the past 18 years, Sherrard has also pastored Leeward Community Church in Pearl City, Oahu, now the largest Christian and Missionary Alliance church in Hawaii.
—The Russian Orthodox Church has taken formal steps to begin a canonization process of Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar. Nicholas, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were executed by revolutionist Bolsheviks in 1918, the beginning of an atheist Communist reign that lasted until 1991. Unlike the Catholic church, which bases sainthood on holiness or miracles, martyrdom itself qualifies as a condition of sainthood in the Orthodox church.
—The Church of England has appointed its first pub chaplain, 57-year-old layman Colin Shaw. In the unpaid post, Shaw gives counsel to patrons at Cambridge Blue, a tavern in the university city. Shaw, who studied pastoral theology at Cambridge University after retiring, has been a pub regular for seven years..
Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
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Christian relief agencies are stepping up relief to North Korea due to a widespread food crisis observers say is worse than Ethiopia’s in the 1980s.
While the shortage is not yet a famine, Trish Jordan of Canadian Foodgrains Bank says starvation soon will intensify. “It’s as if you have 22 million people in a boat heading toward a huge waterfall, and we’re trying to do whatever we can to keep it from going over the edge.”
Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a partnership of 13 organizations, ranging from the Mennonite Central Committee Canada to Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. The group has shipped 4,800 tons of rice to North Korea since this summer. Parachurch organizations also are sending rice to North Korea, including the Seattle-based mission agency East Gates Ministries International, which forwarded 400 tons of rice in June. World Vision, which is leading a consortium of ministries in aiding the country, has sent 1,650 tons of rice, as well as $3 million worth of medicine, medical supplies, clothing, and seeds.
The United Nations World Food Program is overseeing the food distribution.
Hailstorms ravaged fields in the isolationist nation in 1994. Severe floods, which killed thousands of Koreans, have decimated rice crops for the past two years. About 700,000 tons of rice have been shipped to the Communist country since last year’s floods, mostly in bilateral assistance from China and Japan. The country continues its policy of repressing religious expression. There are three Christian congregations allowed to function in the country of 25 million people.
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Crowds in the East Java town of Situbondo, angry at the sentencing of a Muslim who had been found guilty of insulting Islam, went on a destructive rampage October 10 leaving at least five Christians dead among several burned churches.
More than 2,000 Muslims destroyed two Christian schools, an orphanage, and 18 Reformed, Pentecostal, and Catholic churches in several East Java towns. In all, 25 churches were damaged in the riots, 17 of them by fire.
Ishak Christian, the pastor of a Surabaya Pentecostal church, his wife, daughter, niece, and a church-staff worker were killed when they became trapped in their burning church.
At least 52 of the rioters were arrested, and State Secretary Moerdiono promised to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. However, according to a Reuter news report, East Java Governor Basofi Sudirman wanted information about the riots hushed.
The crowds had been calling for the death penalty for a local Muslim sect leader named Saleh, who had been convicted of insulting Islam. Saleh received the maximum sentence of five years in prison. After setting the courthouse ablaze and temporarily forcing the judge and suspect into hiding, crowds targeted churches.
Muslim leaders in Indonesia expressed regret at the rioting. More than 200 Indonesian churches have been burned or vandalized since 1991, including 10 Protestant churches one Sunday morning in June (CT, Sept. 16, 1996, p. 112). According to International Christian Concern, the government has not brought charges against any rioters involved in the June incident.
About 85 percent of Indonesia’s population is Muslim, with more adherents to Islam than any other country.
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*Click here to read part one of this article.
Ralph Reed, 35Executive director, Christian Coalition
“Vote for Ralph Reed: The Little Giant” was the motto of the then junior-high politico wannabe who was running for student council. Today, as executive director of the Christian Coalition—which represents, says Time magazine, “the most thorough penetration of the secular world of American politics by a religious organization in this century”—Ralph Reed is no longer a wannabe. In 1989 Reed met Pat Robertson, who asked for the young doctoral student’s advice on how to revitalize his supporters after his failed presidential bid. After follow-up conversations, Robertson handed over his mailing list to Reed, which Reed translated into a community-based, local-issue-driven groundswell of politically active conservative Christians. Today his advice is solicited by a spectrum of leaders and politicians, usually Republicans, though he insists that CC members are not in the lap of the GOP: “They’re conservative, religious people that are pro-life.” Reed says he hopes that the CC will be a “long-term participant in American public life,” working “to see a day when the sanctity of innocent life is enshrined in our laws and in the Constitution.”
Bruce Main, 39Founder, Urban Promise
When Bruce Main was a freshman at Azusa Pacific University, he asked himself, “Where in the U.S. are children and teens most needy?” After college and Fuller Seminary, he and his young bride, Pamela, moved to the economically depressed city of Camden, New Jersey. Nine years later he is still there, heading the organization he founded, Urban Promise, with its 30 full-time paid and volunteer staff and an annual budget of $1 million. The ministry sponsors job workshops, after-school programs, summer day camps (for nearly 1,000 children), and two gospel choirs. It also gives high-school students tours of historic African-American colleges. “With a 60 percent dropout rate in our high schools here, and with less than 4 percent finishing college,” says Bruce, “we are excited that 15 of our youth are now freshmen and sophomores in college, and that 70 percent of our current high schoolers are now seriously considering college.” The next big project for Urban Promise: a Christian school in Camden to open September 1997. Tony Campolo, who first inspired Bruce to consider urban ministry when he spoke at Azusa, notes: “Bruce has created and developed one of the most significant urban ministries in America.”
Michael Teague, 37C.O.O., Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles
When Michael Teague goes to his office at the Union Rescue Mission in L.A. every morning, he is motivated by the conviction that “today’s rescue missions are as integral to cities throughout the United States as were Good Samaritans on the road to Jericho some 2,000 years ago.” Now chief operations officer at the largest rescue mission in the U.S. (annual budget: $14 million) and a sought-after consultant to other shelters, including one in Capetown, South Africa, Teague is convinced that today’s rescue missions need to go far beyond the stereotypes. Union, for example, sponsors job-training and addiction-recovery programs as well as runs a health center, a transitional-housing complex, and a youth center. “Today, less than 5 percent of the rescue mission population fit the stereotype—middle-aged, Caucasian alcoholic,” he says. “Instead, the fastest-growing population served is women and children, who make up one-third of all homeless people in shelters today. Minority men between 30 and 35 years of age make up another one-third of this population, with over 80 percent of them addicted to chemicals.” With a background in business (B.A. in business administration and three years as a financial analyst for Texaco) and ministry (a seminary degree, five years as an associate pastor, and three years at a Seattle rescue mission), Teague, says Stephen Burger, head of the International Union of Gospel Missions, “has moved quickly through the ranks of rescue mission leadership and is one of the outstanding young leaders in urban ministry today.”
DC Talk: Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait, Kevin Smith, 31, 29, 28Rappers
Take three good-looking college students, put them together to form a Christian rap group, and chances are you would end up with a flash in the pan. But since their debut album in 1989, DC Talk has moved beyond flash to phenomenon. Their 1995 release, Jesus Freak, entered the Billboard Top 200 at number 16, making it the highest-ranked debut ever for a Christian album. It also tallied record-breaking first-week sales, at 85,000. (By comparison, recent releases by Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant sold 51,000 and 55,000 respectively in their first week.) But Toby, Michael, and Kevin say they are less concerned with gold and platinum than with the thousands of teens in their audiences. “We’ve made it our goal to be missionaries to our generation,” says Toby. “We thought, ‘If we speak their language, they’re more apt to listen.’ For our generation, the language is music.” Recognizing the inherent dangers that come with success, Toby adds, “My number-one prayer has been for God to put a team of people around us who will keep us accountable. God has answered that prayer. We travel with a team of guys, including a pastor, who are willing to challenge us spiritually as well as creatively.”
E. Bailey Marks, Jr., 34Director, Youth at the Crossroads
Teens were dying of AIDS in Malawi. Could Campus Crusade help? Crusade’s workers in Malawi answered by developing an AIDS-prevention teacher-training curriculum, and Marks, working in 1994 for Crusade’s international division, spearheaded its use in areas outside Malawi. Now the program runs in nearly 20 countries, including Hungary, Honduras, Hong Kong, and Lithuania. In these countries, 2,100 teachers have been trained. These teachers, in turn, have reached 125,000 students with the aids-prevention message, 25,000 of whom have made decisions for Christ. With HIV infection rising at a staggering rate in some parts of the world (some areas of Africa are afflicted with a 20 percent infection rate; an estimated 10 million Asians will be infected with HIV by 2000; and the rate of HIV infection is up 60 percent in India since 1993), Marks hopes Youth at the Crossroads will have trained 250,000 to 375,000 teachers in more than 50 countries by 2000. About 22 million students would be exposed to the program’s philosophy—that the only way to stop HIV is through abstinence, that this requires character and value transformation, which is best accomplished through a “personal relationship to Christ.” Says Marks: “AIDS is a social problem that ultimately is a spiritual problem.”
Steven W. Fitschen, 39Executive director, National Legal Foundation
When founder Robert Skolrood retired last year after a decade as head of the Virginia Beach-based National Legal Foundation, he convinced the NLF board his successor did not need to be a lawyer. Enter Steve Fitschen, who had earlier spent eight years as a forester. Still working on his law degree, Fitschen has rejuvenated the public-interest law firm, which, like the Rutherford Institute and the American Center for Law and Justice, pleads religious-liberty cases. Fitschen, who formerly served as ACLJ’s executive vice president, says that NLF uses a “principled rather than pragmatic approach, from a theologically conservative point of view.” While NLF is still small, it is influential. This year, NLF helped introduce the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress, which was passed and then signed into law. Many viewed NLF as being on the fringe for proposing impeachment of the six Supreme Court justices who voted to strike down Colorado’s Amendment 2. NLF assistant administrator Steve Magnuson says it seemed too far-fetched for anybody else to address, “but Steve researched it, got the idea moving, and sold it to others.” Pastor Pat Crowder, who started a cell-based church with Fitschen, agrees: “Steve is good at seeing opportunities that others have missed.”
Miroslav Volf, 40Theology professor, Theological Seminary
Called the “Croatian Theology Wonder,” Miroslav Volf is considered by many to have one of the most fertile and provocative Christian minds today. Born in Osijek (in present-day Croatia) and raised in Communist Novi Sad (in present-day Serbia), this son of a Pentecostal pastor eventually earned a master’s degree at Fuller Theological Seminary and a doctorate at the University of T?n, studying under J?Moltmann. Now on the Fuller faculty, Volf stays in touch with his homeland by taking teaching tours to Europe. His theological genius is in recasting “molds.” In Work in the Spirit: Toward a Pneumatological Theology of Work (Oxford), he critiques Luther’s doctrine of “work as vocation” and offers instead a theology of work based on Paul’s doctrine of spiritual gifts. In Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon), he suggests that the liberation theology categories of “oppression and liberation” are inappropriate in the contexts of cultural plurality and strife. Another major work, on the Trinity and community, is forthcoming this year. Volf locates his theology in “classical Protestant Christianity, with a dose of Anabaptist sensibilities” and says that he does theology “for the sake of God and of God’s kingdom,” but also “because it is so much fun.”
Darryl Starnes, 38Evangelism director, AME Zion Church
When Darryl Starnes was growing up, his family would gather each morning before dawn to hear their grandfather, a minister, lead the family devotions. During one such devotion time, Starnes met Christ, and since then he has been preoccupied with evangelism. That burden has led to his being elected to serve his entire denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, as director of evangelism. The 1.2 million-member body has excelled in social ministries, says Starnes; now it aims to complement that strength by entering the next century with aggressive evangelistic efforts. His office, Starnes believes, “must set the spiritual climate from which soul-winning sprouts.” Until his new appointment, Starnes served as pastor of the historic Metropolitan AME Zion Church in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. While there he gained recognition as an exceptional orator. Observes the denomination’s bishop, Richard K. Thompson: “Brother Starnes is a preacher anointed with power and conviction, undergirded by thorough preparation.” Adds his former professor, Timothy George of Beeson Divinity School: “He is a magnetic leader, a quick learner, a deep thinker, a highly effective preacher, and a very warm-hearted individual.”
Dwight Gibson, 37North American director, World Evangelical Fellowship
“I always wondered about the places around the world these stamps were coming from,” recalls Dwight Gibson about his first-grade stamp collection. Now, as North American director for World Evangelical Fellowship, an international association of evangelical associations, Gibson is the one licking foreign stamps in his effort to foster communication among international believers. Especially concerned with issues of religious freedom, Gibson was the force behind WEF’s International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church, which many North American churches participated in this September. Before coming to WEF he worked for the Slavic Gospel Association, where he was struck by the impact and unity of the local churches in the Soviet Union. What he saw drives his vision today to “create a local church that is international.” Observes Gibson, “We’re missing a connectedness of the body of Christ. We need to understand what it means that when one rejoices, we all rejoice, and when one suffers, we all suffer.”
A. C. Green, Jr., Reginald “Reggie” White, 33, 34Green, Jr. – Forward, Phoenix SunsWhite – Defensive end, Green Bay Packers
Ferocious competitors on the court and gridiron, these professional athletes have leveraged their success and wealth into vibrant Christian ministries. A. C. Green, the Phoenix Suns’ scrappy 6′ 9″, 11-year veteran of the nba, heads the A. C. Green Youth Foundation and the Athletes for Abstinence program. His video, book, and personal lifestyle—a single, traveling professional athlete who refuses to live promiscuously—challenge young people and other athletes to a life of purity and integrity.
At 6′ 6″ and 300 pounds, Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers holds the career record for quarterback sacks. When he was named the NFC Defensive Player of the Year for last season, the press played up his moniker of “minister of defense” in reference to his position as associate pastor of his home congregation, Inner City Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. There he runs a summer sports camp for inner-city children and supports a variety of programs, including one that funds inner-city community-development banks. This past January, when his church fell prey to the rash of black-church burnings that swept the South, Reggie emerged as a national spokesperson calling the nation and church to face racism where it exists and raising money to rebuild destroyed churches. “The only thing that overcomes racism,” he says, “is the love of God and the unity amongst the ‘brethren.’ “
Michael Horton, 32President, Christians United for Reformation
Michael Horton believes evangelicals need a second Reformation. At age 13, Horton experienced a spiritual crisis while reading the Book of Romans, wondering, “How can I be right before God if I continue to be a sinner? How do I know I’m in a state of grace?” To find answers, Horton began devouring books on Reformation theology, and it wasn’t long before his reading turned into writing. To date, he has authored eight books, having completed a draft for his first book when he was only 15. “Evangelicalism as a movement,” he has persistently warned in his books, “is rushing headlong toward theological ambiguity, which is another way of saying apostasy.” As a sophomore at Biola University, Horton formed Christians United for Reformation (CURE) and eventually began a radio show, “The White Horse Inn,” now broadcast nationwide on 30 stations, as well as a magazine, Modern Reformation. Horton is also copastor of Christ Reformed Church of Placentia, California, and vice chair of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals-another organization decrying the loss of evangelicalism’s Reformation roots. Despite the multiplicity of his titles, his goal remains singular: the recommitment of evangelicals to the solas of what he hopes was only the first Reformation.
Kathy Rowlett, 36Area director, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
Before becoming a Christian her junior year at Wake Forest University, Kathy Rowlett says she was a “very wild and intimidating person.” While age and regeneration have done some mellowing, she still attacks her work, always willing to cross boundaries—whether political or personal—if it serves the gospel. When still a fledgling in the faith, she volunteered for two years to teach missionary kids in Mexico, and later, under InterVarsity, she organized and led a group of students on a summer evangelistic trip to Kiev State University in Ukraine; the trip was so successful that every summer since then other students have repeated it. Today, after 11 years as an InterVarsity staff member (mostly at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), she is seen as “a spiritual director in the movement for other staff and leaders in InterVarsity,” says Kim Green, a fellow staff worker and friend. Also, as the only female on both the Chapel Hill staff and her current team, she is a role model for many female students and staff. “People seek her out,” Green observes, because “she moves beyond just programs and asks the harder questions about the messy parts of staff members’ and students’ lives.” For her part, Rowlett says simply, “I love to invest in people. That’s my philosophy of ministry.”
Star Parker, 39Founder, Coalition of Urban Affairs
Star Parker, a former welfare mom who robbed a liquor store and had four abortions and a fifth child by age 23, never dreamed she would one day battle the social system on which she had depended. “I was living my ho-hum life, dropping my kid off at government-funded daycare, then hanging out at the beach and getting high all afternoon,” says Parker. But while trying to get work “under the table” at a Christian black-owned advertising agency, she ended up getting saved. Then she heard a preacher ask what felt like a question from above—”What are you doing on welfare?” he boomed—and the next day she canceled her welfare checks. Parker went on to earn a marketing degree, publish a magazine for black Christians, and found a conservative social policy research center. Now a pastor’s wife, Parker has debated the Reverend Jesse Jackson on CNN about moral decline, defended school vouchers on Larry King Live, and decried welfare on Oprah. Her forthcoming autobiography is titled I Can’t Cry Racism (Pocket Books). Parker hopes African Americans in the church will become more involved in making public-policy decisions. “In every area where we have social ills,” she says, “the church has the best track record in keeping people on the straight and narrow.”
M. Craig Barnes, 40Pastor, National Presbyterian Church
In Washington, D.C., every moment is an occasion for gaining power. Into this atmosphere, at the 2,000-member National Presbyterian Church where presidents and senators often worship, Craig Barnes preaches God’s grace and sovereignty. “Every Sunday all these high-powered people tell the world in the prayer of confession that they are sinners in need of a Savior,” says Barnes. “Then they hear the declaration of pardon and jump to their feet to sing the Gloria. That is high drama.” Just nine days after accepting the call to National Pres, Barnes learned he had metastatic cancer. Now, after surgery and radiation therapy, Barnes believes he has been healed. “It was a wonderful opportunity for the pastor to be a symbol of the truth that God’s good sovereign faithfulness is our only hope,” he says. But he had to struggle with the meaning of God’s sovereignty as his associate pastor’s son died of cancer even as Barnes’s health improved. His openness has endeared him to many. Says one parishioner: “You never come out of a Sunday service without feeling like he has been there [suffering] with you. That’s why someone so young can lead a large congregation like this, because he’s felt the pain.”
Susan Bergman, 39Writer
Bergman’s memoir Anonymity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the literary equivalent of exploratory surgery. In it she recalls her discovery of her father’s dual life as both a music director in an evangelical church and a closet homosexual who was the first recorded victim of AIDS in New York. Looking at both her own and her father’s lives, she asks: “Pretense—is that the unforgivable sin?” Schooled at Wheaton College and Northwestern University (Ph.D., literature), Bergman was awarded the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Evangelical scholar Mark Noll calls Bergman’s book a refreshing “proof that solid up-to-date narrative form can wrestle with perennial Christian realities.” Bergman’s latest project has just been released, a collection of essays she edited called Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith (Harper San Francisco). Her introduction to the book was CT’s August cover story.
Greg Lillestrand, 35National director, Worldwide Student Network
“At the end of life when all our pursuits are finished,” Greg Lillestrand and his wife, Charmaine, asked themselves when they graduated from college in 1984, “what would we regret most deeply for not having given our all?” The answer was full-fledged service for Christ. In the years since then, the Lillestrands have focused their efforts on the 60 million students in universities worldwide, serving with Campus Crusade for Christ in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Russia. In the former Soviet Union, Greg pioneered the start of new campus ministries, and today there are 54 national staff in more than 20 locales. Now national director of Crusade’s Worldwide Student Network, Greg hopes to open 400 more overseas chapters in the years ahead. Described as a “Bill Bright-type” leader, Greg remains mindful of three lessons he says God taught him in Russia: “I can never outgive the Lord; when God moves, nothing can stop him; and no matter what is occurring in our lives, God is never caught off guard.”
Kelly Monroe, 36Founder, Harvard Veritas Forum
Today Harvard University is known as one of the main gatekeepers of secular orthodoxy, but Kelly Monroe has documented those who are Finding God at Harvard (Zondervan/HarperCollins). Monroe has edited a collection of 40-plus spiritual autobiographical reflections by Harvard alumni, professors, and speakers that represent what Monroe sees every day in her work as a chaplain to Harvard’s graduate students. Struck by the fact that Harvard was founded by the Puritans so that students would know truth in the person of Jesus Christ, Monroe and her friends banded together in 1992 to refocus on the university’s original mission. They called the group Veritas Forum. “We wanted to create a place where students could ask their deepest questions about the art of life, a place where we could explore the unity and beauty of the truth of Jesus Christ.” Since the founding of Veritas Forum at Harvard, Christians at 20 other schools, including Oxford in England, have opened their own forums modeled after Veritas, reaching an estimated 30,000 students.
Peter Cha, Dave Gibbons, 37, 34Cha – Copastor, Parkwood Community ChurchGibbons – Pastor, NewSong Community Church
Successful pastors do not usually jump for jobs with less pay and no guarantees for success. But both Peter Cha and Dave Gibbons left established positions to start churches for mostly second-generation Asian Americans—Cha in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and Gibbons in Irvine, California. Aware that a majority of Asian Americans are unchurched (despite many being raised in the church), Cha and Gibbons not only pioneered new ministry models, but also created Catalyst, a networking organization for pastors ministering to second-generation Asian Americans. The conferences have drawn so many pastors and laypeople in their first five years that they plan to hold two separate regional conferences next year. “Asian-American Christians in ministry are in a phase where we need to find direction,” says Susan Kim, a regular participant in the conferences. “People have been very blessed by the ministry of Peter and David.”
David P. Gushee, 34Ethics professor, Union University
Two years ago, when David Gushee and his wife learned the baby they were expecting would be stillborn, they chose to have labor induced rather than “have the fetus dismembered by an abortion doctor.” The procedure, they felt, “would have been an offense to the dignity of our child’s life.” Gushee, who is associate professor of Christian studies at Union University (Jackson, Tenn.) and “one of the most thoughtful and well-prepared ethicists in the evangelical world today,” according to Union’s president, David S. Dockery, has displayed such moral sensitivity since childhood. In high school he saw a film on the Jewish Holocaust and “was shattered to know I lived in a world where people could do this to other people,” he remembers. “So when I became a Christian, I was very practically and ethically oriented. I believed that if Christianity was true, it must hold the answers to human suffering.” His Ph.D. dissertation at Union Theological Seminary (N.Y.) and his first book, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust (Fortress), examined why some Christians, under Hitler helped Jews but others didn’t. “The question that drives my academic work is, ‘What is it the church is supposed to be doing in a suffering world?’ ” says the Southern Baptist former professor and acting associate theology dean at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. For him the answer has included being the principal author of his denomination’s widely quoted 1994 statement on abortion-clinic violence and helping draft the historic 1995 SBC Resolution on Racial Reconciliation.
Alvin C. Bibbs, Sr., 34Urban ministries director, Willow Creek Community Church
Alvin Bibbs ventured into a Chicago neighborhood to start a Young Life group and found an Uzi pointed at his head. Five gang members told him never to come back: “This is our turf.”
“You might have won today,” Bibbs told his assailants, “but this is not your or my turf. This is holy ground.” Bibbs was never threatened again. It was not the first or last time he would overcome opposition. The first was making the leap out of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project and into a successful sports and academic college career. Next it was becoming Young Life’s first African-American regional director for a major city, during which he helped the organization see areas where it could be more sensitive to racial issues. Now, as founder of Hoop Dreams Foundation, he provides college scholarships for athletic students, and as director of Local Compassion and Urban Ministries at Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, he raises members’ awareness of social justice and racial issues. “I am driven by the question: ‘How do we bring people together?’ ” says Bibbs, who is ordained. “God calls us to reconciliation, so my goal is to help make what is not seen—God’s unity and call to reconciliation—visible.”
Dan Owens, 40Evangelist, Luis Palau Evangelistic Association
Dan Owens seemed an unlikely candidate to become an evangelist. Other children ridiculed him because of a speech impediment and because of his excess weight. By the time he had become a teenager he had fallen in with a carousing crowd. But at 17, Owens became a Christian, later attended Multnomah Seminary, and then became youth pastor for a Portland church. It happened to be the church that evangelist Luis Palau attended. In 1986 Palau asked Owens to join the Luis Palau Evangelistic Association, and Owens agreed, planning to stay for only a couple of years. Yet, in 1992, he became LPEA’s first associate evangelist. Today he is recognized as the apparent successor to Palau, who turns 62 this month. Owens has visited 35 countries with Palau, preaching at nightly crusades, training counselors, and organizing the campaigns themselves. Owens is handling much of the preaching this month in a Lahore, Pakistan, campaign. “He touches the conscience without being negative.” Palau says of Owens. “Yet he is a winsome person with a good spirit. He commands attention without being egocentric.”
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- Evangelicalism