Page 6094 – Christianity Today (2024)

“The very necessity for organizing special evangelistic efforts betrays the deep need of the Church for renewal”

Evangelism never seemed to be an “issue” in the New Testament. That is to say, one does not find the apostles urging, exhorting, scolding, planning, and organizing for evangelistic programs. In the apostolic Church, evangelism was somehow “assumed,” and it functioned without special meetings, special courses, special training, special techniques, or special programs. Evangelism happened! Issuing effortlessly from the community of believers as light from the sun, it was automatic, spontaneous, continuous, contagious.

Roland Allen, Anglican missionary to China (1895–1903), parish pastor in England, and missionary author, contrasts the contemporary with the New Testament evangelistic approach as follows:

When we turn from the restless entreaties and exhortations which fill the pages of our modern missionary magazines to the pages of the New Testament, we are astonished at the change in the atmosphere. St. Paul does not repeatedly exhort his churches to subscribe money for the propagation of the faith; he is far more concerned to explain to them what the faith is, and how they ought to practice and keep it. The same is true of St. Peter and St. John, and of all the apostolic writers; they do not seem to feel any necessity to repeat the great commission, and to urge that it is the duty of their converts to make disciples of all nations. What we read in the New Testament is not anxious appeal to Christians to spread the gospel, but a note here and there which suggests how the gospel was being spread abroad.… For centuries the Christian church continued to expand by its own inherent grace [italics ours], and threw up an unceasing supply of missionaries without any direct exhortation [Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962, p. 6].

Four statements recorded by Luke show this spontaneous expansion of the apostolic church by virtue of its inner health. “And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved” (Acts 2:46, 47). “And the word of God increased; and the number of the disciples multiplied in Jerusalem greatly; and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). “Then had the churches rest throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria, and were edified; and walking in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost, were multiplied” (Acts 9:31). “And so were the churches established in the faith, and increased in number daily” (Acts 16:5).

The sense of spontaneity and of effortlessness is inescapable in these accounts of additions to the primitive Church. As the “word of God increased,” as believers in fellowship “were edified” and “walked in the fear of the Lord, and in the comfort of the Holy Ghost,” as they were “established in the faith,” converts were “added daily.” Because of its spiritual health, the apostolic Church experienced exciting and effective evangelistic results with monotonous regularity. It is a safe assumption that evangelism is inevitable in a spiritually robust congregation. Failure to be evangelistic or “mission minded” in the New Testament sense betrays a poor spiritual condition. The way to evangelistic vigor is not some special emphasis or program but rather repentance and healing and nurture. The very necessity for organizing special evangelistic efforts betrays the deep need of the Church for renewal. One might as well exhort a woman with a barren womb to have children as to exhort a sterile church to evangelize or respond to missions.

Evangelism was not optional in the New Testament: Jesus did not say, “… ye may be witnesses unto me after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you.” Nor on the other hand was evangelism coercive; Jesus did not say, “… ye must be witnesses unto me.…” Rather, evangelism was inescapable! Jesus said, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). That is to say, the Spirit-empowered Christians were witnesses, not because they chose to be or were compelled to be, but because the divine Witness indwelt them and worked through them. They did not witness because they had to but because they could not help it. “We cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

“Verily, verily, I say unto you,” Jesus promised with absolute certainty, “he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father” (John 14:12). What Jesus has done in the world, those who believed on him would do also, not because they chose to, nor because it was required of them, but because they would be embodied by the same Spirit who had done the work in and through the incarnate Christ. Through Spirit-empowered disciples, the world would be convicted of “sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8).

Those early disciples were no less human than we, no less subject to temptation, no less dogged by human weakness and inadequacy. They had none of the so-called advantages we enjoy in our contemporary churches because of nineteen centuries of history and tradition. Their world was certainly no less hostile to the Gospel of Christ than ours. Yet with their witness they “turned the world upside down.” They were of one mind. Their witness was unanimous because their infilling with the Holy Spirit was unanimous. Their witness was unanimous because they “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The New Testament clearly shows that Jesus expected every disciple to be an evangelist in the sense of being a witness; this expectation was certain of fulfillment, moreover, because of the promised Holy Spirit who filled all the disciples waiting in the upper room and apparently all who were subsequently added to the fellowship. It is likewise abundantly clear in the New Testament that despite their weak and sinful humanity, those early Christians were often found exhorting and encouraging one another, confessing their faults one to another, praying for one another and bearing one another’s burdens, honoring and esteeming others better than themselves. Whatever they did individually in their witness for Christ they shared with others who prayed for them and studied the apostles’ doctrine with them.

In short, fellowship was essential to their witness. Indeed, authentic Christian fellowship was the matrix of New Testament evangelism. Witnessing proceeded out of fellowship forward and into fellowship. “That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). J. B. Phillips translates the verse following, “… the more that fellowship extends, the greater the joy it brings to us who are already in it.” Commenting on this particular verse in his exposition of First John, G. G. Findlay says, “We have a great secret in common—we and the Apostles. The Father told it to Jesus, Jesus to them, they to us, and we to others. Those who have seen and heard such things, cannot keep the knowledge to themselves” (George G. Findlay, Fellowship in the Life Eternal, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919, p. 89).

The world has nothing to offer that is comparable to authentic Christian fellowship, no social structure or unit or function that corresponds even remotely. Lodges, clubs, fraternities, secret societies, taverns, bars, and so on are the best that secularism can provide, and surely they fall infinitely short of the satisfaction and fulfillment brought by Christian fellowship. Exposed to this unique spiritual relationship, contemporary, sophisticated, pagan man finds there a quality completely lacking in any other associations. In and of itself, fellowship in the New Testament sense is a testimony to the world, a demonstration of the efficacy of redemption. The unregenerate man finds it attractive, compelling, fulfilling. This explains at least partially Luke’s observation that the early disciples had “favour with all the people” (Acts 2:47).

Whatever evangelistic impact the individual Christian may have on the world where Christ “sows” him, much depends upon his relation to other Christians. Fellowship is fundamental to effective personal evangelism. Evangelistic methods can never be a substitute for it. However thoughtfully propagated and cleverly applied, methods will be ultimately fruitful or futile depending upon the quality of Christian community into and out from which move those who use the methods. In this context the significance of Jesus’ remarkable promise in Matthew 18:19, 20 and his sending forth of the disciples two by two can be most deeply appreciated. It is hardly accidental that at this point Matthew records Peter’s question concerning forgiveness and our Lord’s penetrating answer (Matt. 18:21–35). “Then,” we read, “came Peter to him, and said, ‘Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times?’ Jesus saith unto him, ‘I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.’”

Reconciliation between Christians is an absolute requisite to fellowship. In the opening words of his first epistle, the Apostle John establishes the centrality of fellowship as the evangelistic goal and motive. He then instructs his readers concerning the nature of that fellowship—a matter of basic honesty about oneself (1 John 1:5–10). To “walk in darkness,” that is, to say “that we have no sin,” is to be self-deceived and to frustrate fellowship. To “walk in the light,” which means to acknowledge or “confess our sins,” is to be forgiven and cleansed and to “have fellowship one with another.”

In the apostolic Church, the relation between believers and God and among fellow believers was paramount. The light and warmth and love, the forgiveness and acceptance that emanated from that unique community penetrated a jaded, bored, loveless, weary culture and awakened the spiritual hunger of both Jew and pagan. “Lo, how they love one another!” it was said of them; sin-sick, fed-up men tried to understand the strange and inviting quality of life that marked the disciples. In such an appealing atmosphere, lost men were ready to hear those who could not but “speak the things which [they had] seen and heard.”

Today in personal evangelism the tendency is to ignore the relations within the Christian community and to be preoccupied with the individual Christian’s relation to those outside the Church. As a consequence, one of the greatest stumbling blocks to the world outside the Church is the way Christians treat one another. Today’s world might be inclined to say with some justification as it views the Church, “Lo, how they dislike one another!” The faithful work of zealous Christians in personal evangelism is often neutralized by the attitudes and actions within the Christian family. The corporate image of the Church often nullifies the faithful witness of individual members. And there is that peculiar phenomenon, the zealous Christian who in his desire to do personal work walks a guarded, careful way among unbelievers but who within the Christian community acts like the devil himself.

Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:35). In his lesson on prayer (Matt. 6:5–15), Jesus underscored one petition in the model prayer, as if to cite it as essential to Christian conduct: “If ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” In regard to offering as a part of worship (Matt. 5:23, 24) Jesus cautioned, “If thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”

Paul’s description of the delicate balance that God in his sovereignty has achieved in placing each member of the body (1 Cor. 12:18–26) suggests the gentlest, tenderest of relationships among Christians: “… the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.” Roland Allen describes the spontaneous expansion of the Church as something that “follows the irresistible attraction of the Christian church for men who see its ordered life, and are drawn to it by desire to discover the secret of a life which they instinctively desire to share” (op. cit., p. 7).

All evangelism is born out of such a relationship, and personal evangelism in the true New Testament sense will be the inevitable and abundant fruit of such renewal in the Church. Outside this context, methods of personal evangelism can be perilous indeed. Methods wrongly born may attract, indoctrinate, and regiment certain zealous persons in a way that produces self-conscious, “spiritually elite” individuals preoccupied with “results,” who tend to think of themselves as superior to those not so inclined. This kind of situation militates against the fellowship and hence defeats witness; moreover it tends also to suggest to the rest of the Christian community the false view that without a special course in personal work and evangelistic methods, one is not qualified to bear witness to the outsider. We do not discredit methods properly taught and practiced (the Holy Spirit uses means); we insist, rather, that they always be kept in the context of the total life of the Christian community and subordinate to the ministry of the Spirit of God within believers as individuals and as a body.

Evangelism in the finest New Testament tradition is the vocation of every believer; for this calling, the Holy Spirit of God will equip the believer through “the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers.” Any methodology that produces a kind of semi-professional class of evangelist within the Christian community, implying that personal evangelism is limited to those who have the time and/or inclination to take special courses and learn special methods, militates against total involvement, justifies those who default, and discourages those unable to master certain evangelistic techniques. In such a situation the distinctive feature is not one’s relation to Jesus Christ, to the Holy Spirit, and to others in the Christian family but rather an artificial “system” that, however effectively used by its proponents, tends to make all others, voluntarily or involuntarily, feel useless so far as evangelism is concerned.

It is important at this point to distinguish between the general Christian community and those independent organizations founded for a specific evangelistic thrust in a specialized way to a particular group or groups. This paper is to be understood in the context of the Christian congregation as it exists in its natural form, a microcosm of the universal Church, a heterogeneous community of all kinds of people of all ages with diverse gifts and abilities bound together in a particular fellowship. It does not apply to organizations of specialists, hom*ogeneous in nature, drawn out of many congregations, uniform in methods, dedicated and trained for a clearly defined and limited evangelistic purpose. As far as the writer can tell, the New Testament does not contain specific instructions for such groups but rather addresses itself to the total Christian family: the strong and the weak, the attractive and the unattractive, the gifted and the not so gifted, the brilliant and the humble. The Church of Christ is made up of all kinds of sheep. “One sows, another waters, but God gives the increase.” The Church has its Pauls and its Barnabases, its Peters and its Andrews, its Stephens and its Timons, its Marys and its Marthas.

This suggests another grave danger in a methodology that does not take into account the ministry of the Holy Spirit in the total Christian community. That is the tendency to regimentation, which hinders a Christian from being himself in the fullness of the Holy Spirit and the fellowship. Under these conditions his Christian influence becomes something else than what it might be if he were really himself, unique among other Christians in bearing his personal influence for Christ among those in whose midst he is placed and to whom he is peculiarly fitted. Instead, under the pressure of the system, he tends to become like the one whose methods he is learning. The implication is, of course, that what works for one person will work for everyone in the same way. Within limits this generalization may be true; but if it prohibits a Christian from finding himself with the endowment given at birth or by the Holy Spirit, then such a system is sub-Christian and perilous.

The one completely safe and dependable manual on personal evangelism and witness is the New Testament; yet the more one studies the New Testament, the less one can deduce from it a system of personal evangelistic methods. Jesus employed a different approach with each person. He reminded Nicodemus that he “must be born again”; so far as we know, Jesus never said these same words to any other. He spoke quite differently to the Samaritan woman at the well. And with the rich young ruler or the questioning lawyer he again used entirely different techniques. His dealing with the man born blind was different, not only from the approach used with others in general, but even from that used with other blind men. Jesus dealt with no two seekers alike. His ways with men were as diverse as the persons to whom he spoke and with whom he reasoned. One factor alone remained constant in Jesus’ contacts with men: his personal presence. This selfsame fact of his presence, incidentally, is guaranteed every personal evangelist who labors in the fullness of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 2:15).

Andrew’s approach was different from Peter’s; and the approaches of both were unlike that of Paul, this one who determined to be “all things to all men, that he might by all means save some.” Neither Peter nor Paul laid down systems or methods, except in the most general sense, whereby their disciples might propagate the Gospel. “The things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also,” Paul exhorted his young disciple Timothy; that was the extent to which he passed on his methods to his disciples. They were to transmit a message to men who in turn would transmit it to still others; just how this message would be propagated was left to the personality and gifts of each messenger.

No one, in fact, was so emphatic in insisting on the diversity of each Christian’s witness as Paul. “I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For … we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office …” (Rom. 12:3, 4).

Paul’s understanding of the mission of the Church is most clearly given in his letter to the Ephesians, where he describes Christ’s giving of gifts to men: “He gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:11, 12). Each Christian is equipped for the work of ministry as he is empowered by the Holy Spirit and instructed in the apostles’ doctrine, in fellowship, in breaking of bread, and in prayer with other disciples. He becomes able to testify to the reality and relevance of Jesus Christ on the basis of personal experience. He becomes able to communicate to others the facts about Jesus Christ upon which this personal relationship is based. Taught in the Scriptures, he has a defensible faith and is able to give an answer to him that asks the reason of the hope within him. He does this in his own distinctive way.

What must be done to bring Christians to this place of positive, effective witness? What means are to be used to guarantee that each Christian will fulfill his vocation as Christ intended, using the methods that are peculiar to him in the Spirit and suited to those among whom Christ plants him and to whom Christ sends him?

1. Each Christian must be made to realize that the work of the ministry belongs to all Christians. It is not reserved for a few professionals peculiarly equipped and educated to evangelize; nor can it be delegated to a group of semi-professionals who have been given a special indoctrination in evangelistic techniques. The empowering of the Holy Spirit qualifies the Christian for witness, and Jesus Christ promised him to every believer. As the Holy Spirit worked through Christ in his incarnation, so the Holy Spirit will work through all who believe in him now. Actually there is only one Evangelist, one Preacher, one Missionary, one Witness; and that One is the Holy Spirit, who will do his work in and through all who take Christ and his mission seriously. The Great Commission is the personal, inescapable obligation of every Christian, no exceptions!

2. Keeping this vision of total involvement in constant view, Christians must be instructed in the Scriptures in order to know Christ’s person and mission in history, the reason for his death by crucifixion, and the significance of his resurrection.

3. They must know that the warfare in which they are engaged in evangelism is “spiritual” warfare and that the only weapon provided by God for this conflict is the “sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Eph. 6:17). Their main discipline, therefore, is to study the Scriptures that they may become increasingly proficient in using them (2 Tim. 3:14–17).

4. Christians must be encouraged to “lead from weakness,” as Paul did (1 Cor. 2:3); they must learn to depend upon the efficacy of their weapon and upon the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. Here again the inclination to lean upon methods rather than upon the Holy Spirit can be a peril; propagating methods of personal evangelism, if not carefully guarded, may imply that one must “lead from strength” or somehow be stronger than those to whom he speaks. It is almost as if the potential convert must be “conquered,” an outcome that demands superior strength on the part of the evangelist. If it is not guarded against, the trainee gets the idea that not to get a decision constitutes failure, an outcome the methods are intended to preclude. Under such compulsion the arguments must be strengthened, the approach refined, the tactics perfected for the sake of maximum results. It is so easy to overlook the fact that Jesus often did not get a positive response. The rich young ruler, for example, “went away sorrowful.”

5. Christians must be joined with others in authentic fellowship in order to share their experiences, burdens, victories and defeats, weaknesses and faults, hopes and aspirations. They must have opportunity to pray for one another, to bear one another’s burdens, to exhort, rebuke, and admonish one another “in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” They must study the Scriptures together and learn from one another as the Spirit illuminates. They must learn to take seriously the Lord’s profound promise as given in Matthew 18:19, 20; Luke 11:13; John 14:12; and Acts 1:8.

6. Christians must conceive of their lives as a plan of God and must consider what they do as a sacred vocation and where they are as God’s place for them. They must believe that their ordinary tasks, fulfilled as unto the Lord, are as productive for eternity as are those of their pastor. They must know God has placed them where they are as his contact, his distribution center, his agent or ambassador or vessel, by and through whom he speaks and loves and works. They must believe that if the world where they live and work and socialize is to be evangelized, they are the means the Spirit of God will use.

7. Christians must be encouraged to be themselves as God has gifted them; to give themselves (Rom. 12:1, 2) to Christ as living sacrifices in and through whom his will may be demonstrated. They must learn to depend implicitly upon the indwelling Spirit to do the work of Christ by them and to witness to Christ through them. And they must learn to walk by faith in the matter of results, realizing that there are no adequate criteria by which any Christian may measure his effectiveness. They must realize that to desire such criteria is a kind of lust that is unbecoming and may indeed be a pious indulgence that directly contradicts our Lord’s exhortation to self-denial (Luke 9:23; cf. Luke 10:20).

Success as such is an illusion; “it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:2). They must learn to “walk by faith” in this also and to leave the results of their walk and witness with the Lord.

8. Christians should recall continually the lesson of John 15, that the one who “abides” in Christ and in whom his “word abides” will bring forth “much fruit,” as Christ promised. The basic strategy for maximum Christian effectiveness is the abiding life. When we abide in him and his word abides in us, we can be sure that fruit is abounding—not because we see the fruit but because we are abiding!

The methods of evangelism are as numerous and diverse as the vast number of persons to be reached plus those who are to reach them. The worldwide task of evangelism will be realized, not by organizing for evangelism as though it were a department of church life requiring increased emphasis and effort, but by renewing the Church with a fresh infusion of the life of the Spirit. In his introduction to Letters to Young Churches, J. B. Phillips has expressed it vividly:

There is one other point that should be made before the letters are read. Without going into wearisome historical details, we need to remember that these letters were written, and the lives they indicate were led, against a background of paganism. There were no churches, no Sundays, no books about the Faith. Slavery, sexual immorality, cruelty, callousness to human suffering, and a low standard of public opinion, were universal; travelling and communications were chancy and perilous; most people were illiterate. Many Christians today talk about the difficulties of our times as though we should have to wait for better ones before the Christian religion can take root. It is heartening to remember that this faith took root and flourished amazingly in conditions that would have killed anything less vital in a matter of weeks. These early Christians were on fire with the conviction that they had become, through Christ, literally sons of God; they were pioneers of a new humanity, founders of a new Kingdom. They still speak to us across the centuries. Perhaps if we believed what they believed, we might achieve what they achieved.

The story is told of a zealous Christian who approached a Jewish rabbi and asked, “Sir, when are the Jews going to become Christian?” The Rabbi replied, “The Jews will become Christian when the Christians become Christian!”

Whatever the rabbi meant by his delightful response, the fact is that Christians will be evangelists when Christians become Christian! Evangelism will happen as God intended when Christians are rightly related to Christ and to one another.

Nationalism, totalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism are among the world forces that impede the evangelistic thrust

Opposition to forthright and vigorous evangelism is as old as the proclamation of the Christian Gospel. As in apostolic times, so today “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God.” Realism requires us to recognize that man’s built-in resistance to the assertion of the demands of Jesus Christ is a constant element in the sinful human situation. Its presence should not surprise us, and the sensitive evangelist should be prepared to cope lovingly with its manifestations.

Realism demands keen awareness also that at times the factors in human experience that resist proclamation of the Good News gain additional force and supporting rationale by appearing in some new form. We propose to discuss the elements and movements characteristic of our day that are obstacles to projection of the message of Christus Redemptor upon modern society. While most, if not all, of these elements are not entirely new, they seem to exert their force in new and formidable combinations as we move into the last third of the twentieth century. They find vigorous implementation in the dynamics of our time—a time whose developments we witness, not with fear, but with a sense of challenge and a spirit of faith. These matters must be considered from the perspective of a “realism of faith.”

In its extreme form, nationalism is a distortion of the normal love of country and the normal pride men and women take in their country’s achievement. It is foolish to denounce nationalism without trying to understand it. Today’s growing nationalism is a reaction to the older colonialism by peoples who seek “a place in the sun.” It takes no political radicalism to suggest that God’s providence may be working in those movements whereby peoples historically disadvantaged by cultural, economic, or religious factors try to share the freedoms and comforts achieved by more prosperous societies.

There are movements, for example, as expressions of God’s providential order in the world, through which men and women previously limited by predetermined social structures are demanding and receiving the chance to participate creatively in a far broader society. Christians can applaud movements that erase the feeling of fatalism from the underprivileged and that recognize the infusion or restoration of a sense of self-worth as “the Lord’s doing.” At the same time, rising human aspiration may adopt shortsighted methods and thereby thwart its own best interests. In some contexts, at least, nationalism may be one of these myopic techniques.

Nationalism may appeal too largely to past grievances; by holding these too prominently in memory, it may jeopardize their proper evaluation and thus encourage an unwarranted and unfortunate clinging to obsolete cultural patterns. That is to say, people under the pressures of nationalism may adhere to outmoded and deleterious social forms simply as a symbol of resistance to something else that is disliked or not wanted. Nationalistic feeling may thus perpetuate institutions and practices that are actually harmful to the society, and may resist forces that would be beneficial, that would offer new horizons and fresh opportunities. This resistance and rejection may stem from lack of understanding or perspective. Sometimes, for example, even when the contributions of Christian missions are acknowledged and used, a proud people may reject their source on the ground that it is alien and foreign.

Such nationalism may identify an evangelistic agency with colonialism and, as a reflex, advocate emotionally charged policies that offer no positive and far-reaching benefits. Strong nationalistic feeling may lead, for example, to denial of visas to evangelistic missionaries, perhaps on the ground that “they would duplicate the work that nationals can do.” While this is an understandable attitude, it overlooks the fact that the national may desperately need and want help and sympathetic support.

The Christian Church will need to live for a long time with the results of exploitive practices and condescending, humiliating attitudes that secular agencies of the Western nations have exercised among underdeveloped peoples during the past two or three centuries. Or, to turn for a moment to the Church overseas, it may even be that in some places the paternalistic attitude of certain mission leaders has generated its own brand of reflex nationalism. In any case, no one interested in vital evangelism can afford to underestimate the force of nationalism within the rising and aspiring nations. If nationalism has elements that frustrate him, it may nonetheless offer the foregleams of promise. Nationalism has a way of running its course, and better counsel often prevails after a period of fumbling national experimentation.

The second obstacle is totalitarianism. Viewed pragmatically, the questions posed for Christian evangelism by totalitarian systems seem to resolve into simple black-and-white terms: Where totalitarian systems prevail, mission fields close and evangelism, of the public variety at least, ceases. The question comes immediately, however: Should the Christian Church accept this pattern as a final and foregone conclusion?

While it is difficult to project the world of the future, yet there is reason to suspect that many of the slowly developing lands, while they grope for viable political and social systems, will experiment with some form or other of totalitarianism or quasi-totalitarianism. At times this may result in temporary closing of mission areas. However, the processes by which totalitarian systems modify themselves from within may so work in some lands formerly closed to evangelism that opportunities present themselves sooner than we would expect. In other words, if, for example, citizens under dictatorships move increasingly toward stability and away from disruptive revolution, some of the developing lands not now open to public evangelism may in the foreseeable future become lands of promise for evangelistic endeavor. At the same time, we must reconcile ourselves to the probability that some countries formerly very suitable for missionary endeavor may be impenetrable for several decades.

Those who are vitally interested in evangelism are perplexed by the fact that churches in totalitarian lands usually cease to be prophetic in several important ways. First, they seldom speak with a prophetic voice—about, for example, the corruption of their youth by doctrinaire anti-religious teaching. Second, they tend to develop a protective mentality—to remain as inconspicuous as possible lest they be drawn into conflict with official policy. As a consequence, evangelism tends to be either eliminated, or confined to groups in the church’s immediate orbit. In short, churches under totalitarian governments tend to become priestly, ritualistic, and cloistered, and to fall prey to more or less subtle forms of nationalism.

Today’s evangelistic church needs to be keenly alert to possible small opportunities in totalitarian lands. Some countries wholly closed to evangelistic endeavor five or ten years ago, now have a “crack in the door” for operation of a free-church form of evangelization. Openings need to be explored and potential opportunities seized—always with the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Men and women of faith must give no place to a theological fatalism that accepts as final the slamming of a door by revolutionary movements. Not despair but cautious exploration should be the mood of the Christian who seeks to “become all things to all men.”

It is helpful to recall that originally Christianity was projected into a world that was under a sophisticated totalitarian system. No doubt St. Paul and the other Apostles, no less than the Fathers, felt frustrated and limited in many aspects of their work. But they never allowed forbidding external circ*mstances to paralyze them into inaction. Then, as now, those who viewed things with eyes of faith saw God working providentially in human governmental structures, however they may have seemed imperfect as media for expressing God’s activity.

Evangelism in today’s world, is also hindered by our modern materialism. The charge of “materialism” is often leveled indiscriminately against all who are concerned with the material and temporal aspects of human life and society. Some of the unstructured thinking on this question, in the West no less than in the East, has failed to remember that God is creator of the material order and uses it to channel and accomplish both providential and redemptive purposes. To be thoroughly Christian in perspective, one must give proper recognition to the Divine ordination of the material structures of our world; and one must see how the New Testament emphasizes the placement of Christians as stewards within these structures.

We readily grant that concern with the temporal and the material may very easily degenerate into a form of idolatry, an absolutizing of visible finites. We recognize also at this point that certain thinkers tend to posit false antitheses. For example, it was once fashionable for representatives of Eastern cultures to say to the West, “You have refrigerators, but we have spiritual values.” Obviously this is a radical oversimplification, for people of Eastern lands desire to participate in technological progress no less than those of the West. Modern advertising has seen to that!

There is, of course, a place for recognizing and criticizing the materialism that has swept over the world, coming hand in hand with the industrial revolution and more recently with the technological revolution. To say that the factory—the assembly line, if you wish—causes materialism is to oversimplify. It is more correct to say that materialism is a distortion of something that is divinely implanted—a drive that impels man to greater heights of human comfort and human dignity. After all, though the advent of the machine placed heavy loads upon mankind at some points, it also relieved men of certain heavy and degrading burdens. No critique of current materialism is thorough unless it comes to grips with this fact.

The heart of the matter is that materialism is an outlook, an attitude toward life, that measures the meaning and goals of man’s life in terms of visible and tangible things, and that dogmatically casts aside all values that cannot be resolved into these terms or harnessed to the acquisition of goods. In other words, materialism may not only exist at the level of ideology but also become a total philosophy of life. At the ideological level, materialism may be quite independent of the presence or absence of the actual symbols of material existence. The mere availability of material objects is not what generates materialism as a Weltanschauung (although availability or non-availability may complicate the problem); rather, materialism is a basic attitude toward the structures of the universe and toward the nature of human existence. Our divine Lord had this in mind when he said, “Take heed, and beware of covetousness; for a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth” (Luke 12:15).

Although today’s materialism is often covert and unarticulated, it is at the same time constitutive. At the most obvious level, and in the closest meaning of the term, few persons will openly profess materialism. Even in Marxist lands, professed materialism is the articulate creed of the few. Wherever even the most superficial acknowledgment is given to doctrines of human worth and dignity, materialism becomes unpalatable. This reaction answers to something deep within man—something that we gratefully acknowledge has survived the Fall.

However, it is possible to disavow the materialist creed and yet manifest its consequences and expressions to a disturbing degree. Such practical materialism, which uncritically measures all values in terms of visible and tangible things, can produce a climate of indifference that, in the long run, may be less responsive to the Christian Evangel than the climate of active resistance and articulate rejection that stems from avowed materialism. Certainly the latter is easier to recognize than the former; and certainly anyone who professes materialism as an overt creed is more self-conscious of his position, and therefore more susceptible to direct confrontation by the claims of the living Christ.

We are simply saying that covert materialism may offer an oblique form of opposition to Christian evangelism that has far more frustrating aspects than the opposition of creedal and dogmatic materialism. Outspoken opposition is often less difficult to measure and to penetrate than the mildly curious and bland type. Covert materialism tends simply to bypass the claims of our Lord as irrelevant. A message that emphasizes the unseen and the eternal frequently appears quaintly antique and colorless to the materialist mentality, which uncritically but persistently measures life by visible achievement, by the acquisition of symbols of power and status. True Christian evangelism summons men and women to a vital commitment to the unseen—to a Person who in this life must be “seen with the eyes of faith.” It is tragic that a genial, practical form of materialism can decisively dismiss Christ and his claims with a shrug or smile no less than can the hard, dogmatic type.

It would be a grave error to suppose that today’s materialism is seen only in the commitment to tangible and marketable items. On the contrary, the materialism so evident in our affluent civilization is a way of thinking that stresses its own “invisibilities.” These are frequently such factors as leisure, entertainment, modes of “escape.” We would unhesitatingly call “materialistic” the attitudes of those who, for example, make the mere attainment of retirement age a value, and who seek the earliest possible opportunity to withdraw from creative effort, in order to “enjoy life” at the beaches and spas simply as spectators on the world scene.

For all its stress upon how things are to be secured, the spirit of modern materialism rejects the Christian view of work as something God-given and returns to the “classical” view that regards work as a necessary but unwelcome intruder into the life of man. As Carl F. H. Henry rightly observes, the materialistic mood of modern man tries to solve the qualitative problem posed by the biblical mandate to work in narrow quantitative terms. The qualitative approach regards work as a stewardship, to be pursued under the recognition that some day the Lord of the harvest will call the laborers to a reckoning. The quantitative approach tends to view life in terms of how men and women are released from grinding toil in order to engage in a narrowly construed “pursuit of happiness.”

Certainly no Christian can deny that some forms of work and exploitation by ruthless employers violate human dignity and reduce men and women to something less than persons. The evangelical cannot reflect the heart of his Lord without not only sympathizing with those thus bound but also identifying himself, as a Christian citizen, with movements that offer promise of remedying social and economic wrongs. It must be remembered, however, that if exploitation by an unjust employer has served to dull the worker’s ears to the Good News, the tyranny of uncreative leisure is scarcely much better for opening the heart to the Lord’s “Follow me.”

As a member of the Christian task force, the evangelist must therefore bear in mind that today’s materialism has a two-pronged thrust: On the one hand, it encourages and underwrites high (and often inordinate and unrealistic) forms of temporal aspiration; on the other, it tends to make man a prisoner of his own leisure, of his own quest for entertainment, of his own pursuit of spectatorism, of those “escapes” now sought the world over. The result in either case is a shrinking of what gives meaning to life. The most vicious aspect of the tyranny of materialism is its ability to produce merely earth-bound aspirations, to produce a climate in which the transcendent and other-worldly seems strangely antiquated and dull. It is against this kind of materialism that Christian evangelism must do its work, and into the mood created by materialism that evangelism must project its message.

For all the contemporary stress upon individuality and individualism, current materialism nevertheless tends to be anti-individualistic in a particularly invidious sense, in that it affords a wider variety of ways to evade moral accountability. There are trends in our materialistically oriented society that erode the sense of individual self-reliance and foster “great expectations” quite apart from either personal endeavor or personal worth. The Christian ought not to assume a spirit of uncritical and wholesale opposition to programs that try to increase people’s security within a technological society; yet he must recognize that the welfare state, by assuming responsibility for ever more areas of human life that were once considered the legitimate realm for human initiative, undermines the sense of individual responsibility.

This fact has inevitable repercussions for personal evangelism. Proclamation of the Good News is considered to have a basically individual appeal; the proclaimer, through the power of the Divine Spirit, seeks to bring about the confession that “against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51:4a). The calls of our Lord are, after all, intensely and persistently personal. A part of evangelism is the isolating of an individual from the crowd and confronting him with the issues between him and his Maker. The loss of the sense of individual responsibility, which is chargeable in significant part to a materialistic outlook, tends to cause modern man to relegate high ethical and spiritual decisions to the limbo of “matters that are of concern only to the aged, the infirm, and the life-evaders.” This mood is a powerful enemy to the projection of the Christian Evangel.

In summary, let it be said that materialism, insofar as it objectifies the aspirations of long-disadvantaged groups, is a factor with which we must continue to reckon, until there come “a new heaven and a new earth.” Nor will it suffice for the evangelical to take refuge in any simple and acquiescent misapplication of “the poor ye have always with you.” There are, obviously, grave and subtle perils in the contemporary and unconstructed demand for “involvement,” which has come to mean the identification of great ecclesiastical structures with some specific program of social and economic betterment. At the same time, there are equally grave perils in restricting the cutting edge of the Christian Evangel solely to personal redemption, and in neglecting the manner in which the Christian mandate includes bringing the claims of the sovereign Lord of all life to bear upon the structures of society.

But at whatever level materialism asserts its claims within the movements and structures of modern life, it will pose both problems and temptations to the evangelical Christian. Nothing will be gained by an indiscriminate attack upon technology, or by any proposal for some artificial simplification of today’s life. Clarification of vision and Christianization of our value judgments: Yes. Return to an allegedly simple agrarian form of existence: No. Evangelism must take a realistic measure of its opponent. It must seek to examine as highly determinative the issue of man’s involvement with materialism in an increasingly complex society. The emphasis must not be upon a mere denunciation of trends; rather it must be upon the skillful application of the weapons at our disposal to the task of breaching the walls within which material-minded modern man has entrenched himself—the walls of exclusive preoccupation with one-level existence, of cultural and ethical relativity, and of collectivistic evasion of responsibility and ethical accountability.

Today’s intellectual climate is another obstacle to evangelism. The Christian cannot dismiss current intellectual trends with a sweep of the hand as being either basically friendly or unqualifiedly hostile to the proclamation of the Christian message. At the same time, he is being unrealistic if he fails to recognize that the general Zeitgeist of the 1960s tends to be anti-evangelistic in several ways. A brand of intellectualism is abroad that associates itself all too easily with a cavalier attitude toward public, mass evangelism. In some allegedly sophisticated circles, it is regarded as “in” to downgrade evangelistic institutions. To this mood dramatist Bertolt Brecht appealed in his Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (St. Joan of the Stockyards), with its brutal caricature of the Salvation Army.

With predictable and almost boring frequency one hears the typical “liberal” verdict: “The day of mass evangelism is past.” This sentiment had so filtered into the thinking of non-religious circles that until events of the past two decades called it into serious question it was accepted almost as an axiom. Happily God in his providence has brought to the fore movements that have challenged this assumption in wide and significant circles.

Too, scientific naturalism—enjoying tremendous prestige—has been an articulate foe of the major premises underlying Christian evangelism. The honest Christian cannot but admit a certain ambivalence in his attitude toward contemporary naturalistic science. On the one hand, science has discovered techniques and released procedural resources that have revolutionized his way of living and greatly increased his comforts. On the other hand, the overall impact of naturalistic science upon the intellectual and spiritual climate of our age has undercut many factors that are indispensable to vigorous propagation of the Good News. It tends to reduce the force of the Gospel’s appeal to the individual sinner to turn to the supernatural. It tends to crowd out from modern man’s perspective any compelling glimpse of the life to come, and to exclude from his concern those issues that would make the pursuit of that future life an urgent issue.

Again, the intellectual climate of the day frequently caricatures Christianity’s role in the world. This may be done at a number of levels. The modern secularist spirit abstracts the unfortunate elements in the total impact of Christianity in history—these have indeed existed and have done their work—and makes them a gauge for evaluating Christianity as a whole. Or modern intellectualism may press its objections to the Christian revelation by appealing to the alleged claim by other religious systems to exclusive authority. Those who argue this overlook the fact that what is genuine inevitably calls forth its counterfeit; moreover, it is one thing to lay claim to an exclusive authority, and quite another to proclaim a Person who has come into man’s daily life, and who in his own person has come to grips with life’s most persistent and staggering problem and emerged triumphant from the conflict.

Realism demands the recognition also that today’s intellectual climate is shaped by a hedonistic spirit, a spirit that regards pleasure (often understood very superficially) as the highest good. This spirit is articulated in life philosophies that parade as “new”; adherence to them, accordingly, whether in theory or in practice, is regarded as “in” and thus culturally acceptable. Among these none has greater appeal, it seems, than the so-called new morality. Regrettably, some theologians, seeking to be avant-garde, are lending the support of their scholarship and reputation to the so-called situational ethic, which ranges itself against all forms of principial morality. This ethic insists that every behavioral situation is unique and should therefore be met, not by appealing to principles or revealed mandates, but by applying an unstructured form of agape, which allegedly is sufficient, even in volatile and emotionally charged situations, to tell persons what to do.

We do not intend to give a detailed critique here of this system. It must be said, however, that it caricatures the ethical demands of the Christian Evangel and leaves the inexperienced person with the overwhelming task of navigating the seas of a precariously balanced moral world without chart or compass. Moreover, its net result is the diluting of the sense of moral obligation to which the Christian evangelistic message addresses itself. When the ethical norm is rendered nebulous, when the individual himself becomes the ultimate source of ethical judgment, it is no wonder that a person’s awareness of God’s claims upon him is weakened.

A parallel trend is that precipitated by certain superficial psychological systems that seem determined to undercut man’s understanding of sin and guilt. Accounting for human behavior on the basis of environmental pressures upon “normal and neutral response-patterns,” they reduce or eliminate the sense of personal responsibility for those types of behavior that Christianity considers sinful. In many intellectual circles it is fashionable to insist upon a radical reappraisal of all that has historically been called “sin” or “sinful”; the attempt is made to cope with what are termed “feelings of guilt” rather than to point men and women to Him who gave himself to destroy sin and to lift the crushing burden of man’s guilt through genuine forgiveness.

The implications of this for Christian evangelism are evident enough. Those who desire to project the claims of the Lord Christ, the message that by the help of the Holy Spirit seeks to precipitate a sense of guilt in keeping with man’s sin-predicament, and to produce repentance, must realize that in today’s intellectual climate there are sophisticated and highly articulated ideological foes. False intellectualism unceasingly insists that man is somehow captain of his soul and haughtily suggests that to press upon him the claims of supernatural assistance is to downgrade him. This spirit creates a formidable barrier in appealing to the Gospel to meet man’s distressed and helpless plight and his need for supernatural rescue. St. Paul may have been referring to just such elements in the intellectual climate of his day when he reminded the church at Ephesus (and the church of our day with it) that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12).

Besides nationalism, totalitarianism, materialism, and the intellectual climate, further obstacles to evangelism in today’s world are created by the influence of alien elements impinging upon the Church. To a degree sometimes unrecognized, the thought of both members and leaders of the Church is subtly shaped by outside forces that are uncongenial, at times even hostile, to the evangelistic thrust. Interaction between the thinking of the Christian and the thought-climate of his world is inevitable. The mid-twentieth-century Church has been singularly unaware of the massive, if glacial, incursion of paganism into the contemporary world. For far too long, multitudes of Christians have assumed a sort of an “inverted Constantinianism” in this respect—inverted in that the Church has not assumed responsibility for the thought modes of the world but instead has tended to assume the world to be essentially Christian in its ideology.

It is not easy for an organization or an individual to be keenly aware of the essentially alien quality of much of the surrounding world-climate and nevertheless operate affirmatively and creatively within that climate. A certain peril besets anyone who is aware of the crucial and crisis nature of the Christian’s position in an alien thought-world—a peril, namely, of assuming defensive attitudes that will alienate the non-Christian. A greater danger, however, seems to lie in uncritically accepting the ideals and norms of the world and thus becoming their prisoner. To be specific, it is possible for well-meaning Christians to become immersed in the materialistic Weltanschauung to a degree that they do not realize, an experience that leaves them really unimpressed with the urgent claims of the Christian Evangel and its insistence upon the reality of the unseen. After all, materialism is materialism, whether it creeps or gallops!

Further, the Church too often finds its self-image, the vision of its mission, and the understanding of its destiny to be subtly shaped by the essentially pagan nature of its environment. After all, it is not pleasant to acknowledge that the civilization of the so-called Christian West has been erected upon principles that very largely omit God from their reckoning. But it is this that lies at the heart of paganism; and seen in this light, our culture can scarcely be judged in any other terms. In such a situation only a prophetic Church can retain its “vision glorious” and its “hope eternal”; without these, its evangelistic task inevitably loses meaning and dynamic.

Moreover, the Church needs always to be aware of the peril of being paralyzed into inaction by the sheer weight of the forces ranged against it. The statistical trends of the day are not encouraging, for they show that growth in world population is greatest in those areas where the Christian witness seems weakest; nor has missionary endeavor by any reckoning been able to keep pace with the population increase. Perhaps here the Church needs to listen to those whose world vision entitles them to speak and who say that never has there been a time when so many persons from “every nation, kindred, and tongue” lift their voices in a sincere “Our Father.” At the same time, the vast forces ranged against the Christian Gospel and the Christian Church may cut the nerve of evangelistic endeavor, unless they are counterbalanced by a strong assurance that it is “the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

The foregoing obstacles suggest the imperative need for a renewed spirit of discernment, no less of dedication, by the Church—a renewal that takes realistic account of the alien and paganizing forces ranged against the Church, which at every level and front threaten to penetrate its own thinking. The Church needs to become acutely aware that the creeping paganism of the time bears no friendship for the essential facts that underlie aggressive evangelism, such as: the universal sinfulness and consequent lostness of men apart from Christ the Redeemer, the imperatives of repentance and faith in him, the certainty of a final day of reckoning, and the overwhelming sterility of life lived apart from the living Christ. Insofar as the world impinges upon the thinking of the Church, to that degree the presence of built-in opposition to the Evangel constitutes a potentially hostile base of operation against a vital evangelism, especially if this opposition conceals its objectives by subtly invading the intellect.

This constellation of obstacles of evangelism in the world and in the intellectual climate of the world points up several imperative needs within the Church as it faces its task of proclaiming the Gospel. There is need for a renewal of vision. There is need for a realistic assessment of the magnitude and organization of the forces ranged against it. There is need for a renewed appraisal of its mandate to world evangelism and of its “marching orders,” paralleled by a realistic reassessment of the inner dynamic of its message.

Christian realism will dictate an awareness that the crucial and decisive phases of the Church’s struggle cannot be won by any vast holding-operation, however well this might be planned and articulated. This struggle can be met only by a vigorous and affirmative thrust of the Evangel into the age. For such a thrust, our age must have a highly skillful and deeply discerning evangelistic task force.

This theme, that of objections and hindrances to the Gospel in the Church, is a call to self-examination. It is certainly no matter for indifference whether or not we are ready for such self-evaluation, whether we are willing to recognize the problems and requirements of Christian identification in the world, whether we are willing to investigate seriously the actual condition of the Church.

What does it mean when we say that the Church—which by its nature and commission is to be the bearer of the Good News—may itself hinder the influence of the Gospel, that Christians themselves may be guilty if limitations and barriers prevent the spread of God’s Word? Certainly such critical charges cannot be put aside lightly. They deserve a full investigation.

An intensive approach of this kind is possible, of course, only after we have clearly established the basic meaning of the concepts “Gospel” and “Church” and have determined what relation Gospel and Church actually bear to each other.

This much is certain: Gospel and Church are not two giant entities that stand side by side in isolation and that can be judged independently. Actually they stand in an indissoluble relationship. The Gospel points to the Church, and the Church derives from the Gospel. This statement will be properly understood only if we turn aside from what history has come to designate as “Church.” We do well to guard against the many forms and differences, the misconceptions and contradictory statements, given in various religious presentations. Likewise, when we use the word “Gospel” we must remember that its meaning is not determined by some current concept or by subjective interpretation of this or that person’s theology.

Moreover, in considering the determinative relation between the Gospel and the Church, we must go back to the original setting of the New Testament record. We will gain the correct answer to our problem only if we ascertain the origin of the Gospel and the beginnings of the “Christian Church.” This source available to us is thoroughly enlightening. The judgments gained from it are of basic significance for our study.

We must keep three facts clearly in mind. First, we must understand that basic to every statement about the Gospel and the Church is a presupposition that, like a great railroad switch, turns everything in a specific direction. This presupposition is a fact, a reality that men neither have brought about nor are able to produce. This fact is the invasion of God’s revelation into history. The fact that Almighty God descended into the earthly realm of his creatures—that the living God locked himself into the history of humanity, spoke and dealt in a unique way through a specific nation, and then poured out the fullness of his deity and grace in Jesus Christ—manifests a reality that is totally new and beyond comparison. Therefore this reality of the God revealed in Jesus Christ cannot be measured in human terms. Human reason, the world’s reasonableness, must shatter upon it.

The definition of the Gospel now becomes signally clear. It is the “joyous news” that no man could ever have devised, the news that in Jesus Christ God took pity on the world—that the Incarnate One, God’s Son become flesh, Jesus of Nazareth; that the Crucified One, the One who was crucified and died; that the Resurrected One, he whom God raised from the dead, is the Redeemer of the world. This is the “joyous news”: Jesus Christ died as a sacrifice for the world, lives for us as the Risen One, and leads mankind toward its eternal goal.

This brings us to a second consideration: It was this Gospel that gathered together the Body of Christ, that inspired the Christian Church. We fail to understand the meaning of the Church unless we marvel that, as the Easter message spread throughout the world, the Spirit of the living Lord opened the pathway of faith to humble hearts and enabled them to witness for Christ. The Church issued from this Gospel and not from some system of ethics. For this reason the Gospel and the Church stand in the closest of essential relationships. The Gospel is the means, the tool, the instrument through which Jesus Christ reveals himself as active and alive in the Church. Everything, accordingly, depends on whether or not this Gospel is preserved and carried forward unclouded and unabridged. This Gospel not only brings the Church into being but also impresses upon it its nature and substance; the Gospel is the Church’s lifestream that unites it with Christ as its head and heart, as the very core of its being.

In the third place, it becomes evident, from this origin of Christ’s Church in the revelational event, that the Church has a task to do in the world and that it is empowered to go throughout the world. If, as the Body of the living Christ, the Church has become the beginning of a “new creation,” then it is directed to proclaim its joyous news to the world. The overwhelming apostolic confession that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature”—this the Church does not wish to keep only for itself but desires to proclaim as a promise to a weary, death-ridden world. As a Church of the Gospel, therefore, the Church is not called to flee and despise the world, not forced into a narrowminded isolation, not condemned to a ghetto existence. Just the reverse is true: The Church is called to be on display before the world. The Church stands under its Lord’s command: “Go ye into all the world,” “ye shall be my witnesses,” for “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” The Gospel that the Church proclaims to the world is the very invitation extended by Christ himself: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

This relation between the Gospel and the Church represents an extraordinary situation, an unusual authorization, a unique responsibility. What happens, however, when opposition is leveled at the Gospel in the Church itself, when hindrances stand in the way of the Gospel? This is a depressing thought. It deserves our complete attention.

Everything about this matter centers around the basic question of what facts, what circ*mstances, harm the Gospel in the Church, and do so from within. The first determinative principle can be summarized thus: Anything, everything, that bedims the message of the Gospel, that prevents the heart of the Gospel from shining through clear and true, must be considered an obstacle and hindrance.

We must remind ourselves of what confronts us a thousand times over in the life of the Church. We think of Christians who are consciously identified with their churches, who attend and participate in the worship services according to custom, who are willing to give themselves to charitable works—all these things are worthy of note and of recognition. But a certain lack should not be overlooked. There are many who abide completely by and within the limits of the traditional patterns of the Church, who are satisfied with the “iron rations” of the confession of faith learned in childhood, whose Christianity is a matter of sentiment, and who now and then succumb to a pious mood. Certainly we ought not to minimize this; but there are those whose faith has stopped growing, whose progress in the life of faith has been interrupted. They accordingly have stopped meditating on the Gospel in order to gain clarity about the meaning of their faith. For them Christian phrases and biblical terms are like old worn coins whose value is no longer discernible. Therefore their faith does not radiate, has no convicting power; and the Gospel appears lame and weak.

If someone calls himself a Christian and does not himself understand the illuminating power of the Gospel, he is neither qualified nor in a position to bring the Gospel to those outside the Church and to make it plain. The New Testament was keenly aware of this dangerous possibility in the churches and thus laid down the principle: “Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is in you.” If Christians hesitate to give an accounting to themselves and to others of the what and wherefore of their faith, if they step aside from essential exposition of questions of the faith, then the Gospel will become muddied and unclear.

Much more serious, certainly, is the hindrance to the Gospel that comes from the weak faith, the doubting faith, yes, even the unbelief of those who call themselves Christians. Among these, their church membership notwithstanding, an internal falling away from the Gospel has set in; among these, through the deception of non-Christian spiritual powers, deterioration has begun. In such a situation the influence of all kinds of ideologies and world views, of religious speculation such as that spread by the sects, of nihilistic skepticism even to the point of atheistic disputing of God, can spread stealthily through the Church. Suddenly the Christian who through baptism and confirmation was planted into fellowship with Christ succumbs to the whisperings of false spirits, yields to superstitions, and charts his life by horoscopes. The age-old doubt, “Hath God said?,” only too often becomes linked with egoistic lovelessness that cares nothing for neighbors and says, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

This failure to prove the faith and this denial of neighbor-love become a constant offense to the world round about. Because Christians appear so “unredeemed,” and act as if they had no faith, the death sentence is passed upon the Church and thus upon the Gospel itself. The disfigured image that these false representatives give to the life of the Church makes the proclamation of the Gospel untrustworthy and counter-acts the unfolding and outworking of the Gospel that would arouse men and women to faith.

With an eye to hindrances to the Gospel, we must be aware also of another fact: that in the course of history, the difference between the form or structure of the Christian Church and its content or message is inescapably obvious. Of course, to think that the Church of the Gospel could do away with all outward forms and still fulfill its tasks would be a fanatical delusion. The reality of revelation, that “the Logos, the Word of God, became flesh,” already shows the necessity for the historical, bodily, earthly-human aspect of the Church. The first gatherings of the early Church show certain definite patterns, such as fellowship in the apostles’ teaching and faith, celebration of the Lord’s supper, and prayer. The Christian Church in the midst of the world always needs some external form. A glance at church history shows us an abundance of church institutions, large and small organizations of impressive and historically important church groups, as well as powerless church endeavors unnoticed by the world. Their names may be diverse, as may be also their structure and organization.

On the one hand is the hierarchical range of offices that stem from the Church; on the other, the multiplicity of functions.

For our discussion an especially pertinent question is what importance form has had for the success of the Gospel. To what extent does the external structure and order of a church body, however indispensable and justified, hinder or obscure the Gospel?

A church that bears a thankful sense of responsibility to its Reformation fathers will be concerned for maintaining the purity of the Gospel and its furtherance. It will therefore consider church forms, ceremonies, rites, and traditions of only relative value, and in no way necessary for salvation. The structure of the church is never “sacred” but, determined only by suitability, is oriented toward a purposeful proclamation of the Gospel.

This interpretation of church form immediately makes clear what dangers for the Gospel may lurk in this historical institutional structure. It is possible to retain obsolete religious forms, encrusted traditions that hinder a new vital development of the church. A language revered by the Church may as time passes no longer clearly communicate the meaning of the Gospel. There may be a jungle of religious bureaucracy that supersedes the principle of stated order, that assaults and controls the course of daily life and embitters people.

The need for church reform has been stated repeatedly in numerous ways in our time, at the Kirchentage (church conventions), for example. One ought not to be deceived into thinking, however, that much will be accomplished simply by changing external forms. On the contrary, accommodations to current tastes, or the adoption of cheap gimmicks in the Church, can pose hindrances to the Gospel, as interest is shifted to secondary things and the centrality of proclamation is pushed aside.

The only valid consideration for the Church to realize at all times must be what serves the Gospel, its credibility, its deepening, its propagation. What forms, customs, and ordinances must be removed, changed, or avoided, lest the church itself be a burden to faith in the Gospel? When it is under the control of the Gospel, the Church operates vitally, experiences constant proper reformation, and is self-critical in order that the Gospel entrusted to it can function in the world as “light” and “salt.”

In still another area of the Church we find situations that obstruct the Gospel, and in quite another way. Hindrances that we have considered thus far have stemmed from man’s wrong relationships, from the human weakness of church members, or from erroneous evaluation and inadequate ways of presentation; now we confront hindrances that come from altering the Gospel itself. We have seen that correct doctrine and proper proclamation do not guarantee the penetrating power of the Gospel, since various personal and very real circ*mstances can hover over the Gospel like a dismal smokescreen and thus obscure its clarity. But what can be done when the very content of the Gospel is abused and changed, when its essence is misunderstood and misinterpreted?

This question brings us to open wounds that particularly characterize the Christian Church today. The dire case would seem to be that man no longer subjects himself as a listener and receiver to the testimony of the Gospel but instead puts himself under the norm of his own personal discoveries and experiences. Then, according to his comprehension and rational promptings, he adjusts the gospel message to suit his own needs, corrects it and manipulates it for his own purposes. In this matter he at one stroke exalts himself above the authority of the Gospel and makes himself lord over the Word, over God’s revelation.

Obviously this change in the content of the Gospel has far-reaching implications, since the birth, maintenance, or destruction of faith are at stake. Church history has shown the many ways in which such diminution of content has expressed itself. Already in apostolic days threats to the pure Gospel were acute. The early Church obviously was not sheltered and protected like some island in a sea of nations and peoples; rather, it stood in the very midst of countless religious ideas, mythological concepts, and philosophical world views. In other words, the early Church was exposed to foreign influences of many kinds. The Apostle John accordingly found it necessary to warn against the spiritualism of the Gnostics, who denied the revelation of Christ come in the flesh. And at any and all ideas that would adulterate the Gospel he proclaimed into some new legalism, Paul hurls a severe, harsh “No!” He pronounces a passionate “Beware!” upon every perversion of the Gospel, upon the preaching of “another gospel.”

Like dark shadows, such death-dealing threats to the Gospel pursue the Church of Jesus Christ here on earth. Again and again voices are heard that offer their own ideas, their own piety, their own ethics in place of the Gospel’s. On the one hand, one hears claims that only by some particular way, and according to one particular method, only on the basis of some one specific experience, may one become a true Christian; and on the other hand, one sees the silencing and pushing aside of all those statements of the Gospel that do not harmonize with the particular convictions being propagated. Even today one finds a narrowminded, rigid kind of Christianity that lays burdensome demands and duties on the Gospel, a Christian legalism that is neither winsome nor gladdening but repellent and that makes being a Christian seem joyless and depressing.

Quite different, however, is the face of a distorted Gospel, a Gospel that under the influence of some current philosophy and absolutely defined scientific arguments and hypotheses has undergone a content-changing revision. Many have discerned that today we are dealing with just such a profound threat.

The tendency is to refrain from burdening “modern” man with a heavy package of what he must believe; whatever he does not want, and whatever he does not consider rationally comprehensible or actually possible, is avoided. The point of departure is total adaptation to a philosophical system in which the only valid reality is the here and now. This purely immanentistic thought system discards every suggestion or thought of a metaphysical other world, any thought of transcendent reality.

Into these clichés that bear the imprint of certain presuppositions of present-day existentialism, the Gospel must then be fitted. The result, obviously, can be only a thoroughgoing transformation of the Gospel. One can then no longer speak of God as someone above and beyond the world who in sovereign majesty and power can step into the world as Creator and Redeemer. In the realm of causal relationships, no room then remains for miracles whose reality is indissolubly linked with the Gospel. Jesus Christ can be honored only as a man, not as the world’s Redeemer who died on the cross for mankind, not as the risen Lord in whose life rests the basis of eternal hope. In the last analysis the Gospel itself becomes a mere symbol, a code to some new human understanding of the self, a thrust to help gain some anthropological meaning for existence.

The much vaunted goal of modernistic theology to make possible and to simplify Christian faith for today’s man is purchased by changing the essential nature of the Gospel. Continued use of Christian-biblical concepts like Word and faith, Christ and redemption, pardon and eschatology, must not keep us from seeing that these terms have a new, entirely different meaning. Perplexity of spirit, fogging in of the battle lines, uncertainty of individual Christians in knowing what to believe—these are the fruits of this falling away from the Gospel. A Gospel that has become cheap is a defeated, emasculated Gospel that can no longer sound a clear trumpet call.

Obstacles and hindrances to the Gospel inside the Church? To be keenly aware of them and not to consider them harmless is the Church’s responsibility, the task of her theology. This involves honest insight into the deepest needs of the Church and knowledge of how error develops. Such self-awareness is a form of true repentance.

What is needed? A return to the substance of the whole Gospel. Only if the Church stays with its task is fruitful encounter possible with a surrounding world that thinks differently. The very plurality of values and viewpoints today demands singleness of belief by the Church. Only the message of Christ, however unpopular and offensive it may be, can steady a tottering world. In the last analysis, man is unable to break down the barriers and overcome the hindrances. This only the Gospel itself can do, the Gospel that displays the presence and the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

A Boston minister traces the debilitated power of Protestantism to removal of the Bible from the central place of authority

Evangelism must be trinitarian if it is to be biblical. The Great Commission defines the program of the Church for this age by the authority of the Triune God. The Great Commission is one of the earliest statements of trinitarian creedalism; along with the apostolic benediction of Second Corinthians 13:14, it is the basis of the so-called Apostles’ Creed, which is so clearly trinitarian.

The Bible is our authority. A Bible that is the infallible rule of faith and practice is the reason for the existence of Protestantism. The Reformation rediscovered three major truths that established Protestanism as a return to New Testament Christianity. The first truth, called the formal cause of the Reformation, is that the Bible is the final and infallible authority in matters of faith and practice. This is the principle of sola scriptura. The second truth is justification by faith, called the material cause of the Reformation. This is the principle of sola fide. The third truth is the priesthood of the believer. It is a corollary of the other two. The doctrine of the priesthood of the believer proclaims the freedom of the Christian man, expressing his deliverance from priestly mediation, sacerdotalism, and ecclesiastical control.

The principle of sola scriptura has been rejected by liberal Protestantism. For the liberal the Bible is not authoritative, not dependable, and not authentic. This dismissal of the Bible has resulted from the acceptance of evolutionary naturalism and higher criticism. Evolutionary naturalism, applied to religion, necessitated a view that the Hebrew people evolved religiously from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism to ethical monotheism. In accordance with this presupposition, the Bible is viewed as the record of the evolving of religious experiences of the Hebrew people, and the books of the Bible are re-dated on this premise. Higher criticism joins hands with evolutionary naturalism to bring about this result. Thus Karl Barth, speaking at the University of Chicago, could say, “The Bible is full of errors,” and Emil Brunner could make the Bible a shambles in his Revelation and Reason.

The removal of the Bible from the central place of authority in Protestantism has debilitated its power to evangelize. A liberal Protestantism cannot meet the competition of the Roman Catholic Church. In order to build a power structure comparable to the Roman church, it has embraced the activities of the ecumenical movement. This movement intends not only to unite the various Protestant churches but also to circumvent the Reformation in order to find a basis of theology and tradition for reunion with Rome.

The necessity for a return to biblical authority is the reason for our gathering. We are under the Word. Let us therefore give proper place to the Word of God in all our deliberations. Otherwise, only two alternatives exist. The first is to go on to left-wing rationalism, in which the human mind is the supreme authority in religious matters; the second is to return to Rome, where the church is the final authority in doctrine and ethics.

Biblical evangelism is trinitarian. The Bible honors each member of the Trinity in the theology of evangelism. The New Testament makes it clear that the Father elects, which is predestination; that the Son redeems, which is atonement; and that the Holy Spirit regenerates, which is salvation. Heresies arise from the neglect of one aspect of this trinitarian theology or from an over-emphasis upon one particular facet. Historic Christianity has maintained the elements of trinitarian redemption in balance in the central stream of orthodoxy.

A biblical foundation supports all great movements of evangelism. The Reformation, in a literal sense, was a revival. The leaders of the Reformation embraced the truths of the New Testament and sought to reform the existing church in accordance with these truths. They discovered that the church was unreformable, and they themselves were excluded by excommunication from its membership and benefits. Therefore, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and their co-laborers returned to New Testament Christianity, though it meant separation from the Roman Catholic Church of the day. Upon his deathbed in Eisleben, Luther was asked, “Reverend father, do you die in the faith which you have preached and which you have proclaimed?” He replied, “Yes.” The Reformation freed men from the intellectual bondage of scholasticism, from the economic thralldom of feudalism, and from the spiritual slavery to the priesthood. The movement swept the masses into a new sense of freedom. For a time the revival promised to engulf all of Europe.

The Evangelical Revival, under the Wesleys and George Whitefield, occurred two centuries later in the recovery of wide areas of Christian experience that had been obscured. From the Puritans they inherited the emphasis on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. From the Lutherans they received the truth of justification by faith. They rediscovered the truth of the witness of the Holy Spirit and of personal assurance. They preached on the witness of the Spirit more than on any other subject. George Whitefield’s favorite text was, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me …” (Luke 4:18). From this emphasis a revival influence spread throughout England to counteract deadness in the Anglican church and the moral corruption of the masses. The result is known as the Evangelical Revival.

The Finney revival of the mid-nineteenth century came from the emphasis upon the Law and the Gospel. Charles G. Finney’s preaching of the law produced conviction, and his offering of the Gospel brought comfort to the hearts of convicted men. Finney’s emphasis was in accord with such great confessions as the Westminster Confession and the Heidelberg catechism, wherein the law is given its proper place in Christian life.

Today the Billy Graham evangelistic meetings emphasize the Bible as the sword of the Spirit. Dr. Graham’s often repeated clause, “The Bible says,” is characteristic of this evangelistic emphasis.

In these various movements evangelism was based upon biblical theology. If we examine this theology, we shall find that it is trinitarian, for each person of the Trinity bears an important role in evangelism.

God The Father In Evangelism

In speaking of the role attributed to God the Father in evangelism, we emphasize the decrees of God, the election of God, and predestination by God. The divine decrees constitute the plan of salvation. This redemption expresses the divine attributes of love, justice, and wisdom. The Bible makes it plain that redemption originated in divine love, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16), that “God sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10), and that “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself” (2 Cor. 5:19). Grace, then, is God’s love in motion toward our sins.

However, God is just, and justice must be satisfied. In infinite wisdom God devised the means of salvation, which is called the plan of redemption. This plan is expressed in the eternal covenant of redemption. In this covenant the Father agreed to give to the Son a people; the Son covenanted to represent this people by substitution in a life of obedience and in a death of suffering; the Spirit covenanted to apply this efficaciously to men, so that there would be a redeemed people belonging to the Son. This we know from the biblical texts that declare that there is a “kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. 25:34), that there is a “lamb without blemish and without spot: who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:19, 20), and that there is a people “chosen … in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). For this reason, Isaiah could say that Jesus Christ “shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied” (Isa. 53:11). Christ endured his suffering with joy because of the people who were given to him. Jesus Christ on the cross got a glimpse of the multitudes who were redeemed by his suffering, and he was satisfied.

The decrees of God thus established the end from the beginning and the steps along the way. These embrace the fall of man, the atonement made for sinful man through the incarnation and crucifixion of Jesus Christ (all prophesied in detail), the offer of salvation through universal preaching, and the salvation of those who believe or respond affirmatively to this preaching.

God’s part in redemption is called election. Here there are competing theories. The five points of Calvinism speak of the sovereignty of God, the depravity of man, a limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the believer. Not all Christians share this formulation; but those who do hold it believe that God elected some and passed by others. Calvinism declares that the Gospel must be preached in all the world and that those who are elected will accept the Gospel, believe in Jesus Christ, and persevere in good works unto the end. It also teaches that no one can know who is elect except by the fact that he continues in good works and perseveres unto the end.

An illustration of this is found in the Huguenot piety and perseverance in the face of the terrible suffering these people underwent for a century and a half. The Huguenot movement began under the preaching of Stapulensis in 1524 and was most successful. Calvin had to flee from France and settled at Geneva, from whence he directed the Reformation in France. For a time it seemed as if all France would be won to the Reformation, but then reaction set in under the leadership of the Guise family and the Spanish Inquisition. The Huguenots were persecuted economically, socially, and physically. Numerous massacres occurred, not least of which was that of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Six wars of religion occurred that ended in the defeat of the Huguenots and in their emigration to the Netherlands, to Germany, to England, and to America. These Calvinists were inspired by this stern faith to maintain their spirit through the most terrible suffering.

The second view is that named after Arminius, who taught in the University of Leyden from 1604 till his death. Arminius returned to the pre-Augustinian view of conditional election. God, by his eternal and immutable decree, ordained in Jesus Christ to save those who by the grace of the Holy Spirit believe in Jesus Christ and persevere in that faith and obedience of faith. Christ died for all and each, so that he gained reconciliation and remission of sins on the condition that believers remain faithful. Those grafted into Christ by faith have the means to fight Satan, to win the victory, and to persevere by the Holy Spirit. God fore-knew this faith and elected believers unto salvation.

The view one adopts is of great importance to his evangelistic fervor. The matter of election is no mere question of semantics. The resolution of the matter rests in giving proper place to each biblical emphasis. We must not neglect either emphasis. For my part, I approve a practical synergism of affirming prevenient grace, the responsibility of each individual, and election in Christ of all who believe. Thus I say that salvation is all of God, reprobation is all of man. I cannot throw the responsibility of man’s reprobation upon God.

This raises the question of predestination by God and the invitation to accept Christ. The Bible makes it plain that the Holy Spirit attends the preaching of the Word and enables a sinner to accept Jesus Christ as Saviour. The offer of salvation is real, and God does not mock us. It is the Spirit’s work to attend that offer with life-giving power.

Yet we witness two attitudes toward the giving of an invitation. Some ministers, much used of God, have never given an invitation to accept Jesus Christ and will not permit such an invitation to be given from their pulpits. On the other hand, invitations extended in the ministry of Billy Graham and others have found thousands responding affirmatively to the opportunity to accept Christ. In both instances there have been valid and permanent conversions. We must conclude that we cannot be exclusive in our methodology, nor can we sit in judgment upon those who use a different methodology in evangelism from our own. God is sovereign. God honors his Word when it is preached. He attends it by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, although it may be done in different ways.

God The Son In Evangelism

Evangelism must center in the offer of the person of Christ. It pleased God by the foolishness of the kerygma, or the message preached, to save those who believe (1 Cor. 1:21). The kerygma centers in the incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus Christ. In the early centuries of the Church, doctrinal controversy centered upon the person of Christ—whether he possessed one will or two wills, whether he had one nature or two natures, whether he was a man upon whom the Christ descended at his baptism and from whom he ascended before his death, whether He was eternal or a demiurge or first creation above all creation.

Finally, at the Council of Chalcedon, the orthodox view of the person of Christ stated that he possesses a full divine nature and a full human nature, in one person, and so will continue to be forever. He is very God of very God, and very man of very man. There is one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave his life “a ransom for all, to be testified in due time” (1 Tim. 2:6). This is the orthodox view—the view of the Scriptures, of the creeds, and of the confessions of Christendom. Christ was pre-existent, was co-eternal and co-equal with the Father, became incarnate, lived a perfect life, worked miracles, atoned for sin by his death on the cross, arose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, exercises the priestly ministry of intercession, and will come again to reign over his eternal kingdom.

The high view of Christ has always been accepted by evangelical Protestantism and is a prerequisite of evangelism. If we are to have a doctrine of salvation, the full deity of our Lord Jesus Christ and the real humanity of Jesus must be preached. The low view of Christ taken by liberalism cuts the nerve of evangelism and missions. The Revised Standard Version of the Bible unquestionably is a better translation than the King James Version and is more faithful to the manuscripts. My personal objection to it, however, is that wherever the manuscript evidence permitted the translators to present either a high or low view of Christ, as in Isaiah 7:14, or in Micah 5:2, the translators chose the lower view. This does not impinge upon their ability as translators, but it does reflect their presuppositions in the translation. Liberalism has always taken the low view of the person of Christ.

Evangelism centers in the offer of the propitiation of Calvary. The Bible statements of this fact are many (Rom. 3:25; 2 Cor. 5:21; 1 Pet. 2:24; 3:17). Three words are used in these statements. One is peri (translated “for”), meaning “concerning”; another is anti (translated “instead of”) meaning “in the place of”; and another is huper (translated “in behalf of”), meaning “for the sake of.” The Bible teaches that Christ died for us, in the place of us, and in behalf of us.

Various theories concerning the Atonement have been taught, such as the governmental view, the exemplary view, the piacular view, and the view of vicarious redemption. All these emphases are to be found in the Scripture, but they are found as manifestations of the basic teaching that Jesus Christ satisfied the demands of divine righteousness, substituted for us in his act of passive obedience to justice, and thus demonstrated in his life and death a divine justice and love. From this derived the governmental, the moral, and the exemplary views of the Atonement. It is this Gospel of redemption that is able to affect the will; nothing will move men to repentance and faith as does the preaching of the propitiation of Calvary.

Evangelism must emphasize the particularism of the Christian faith. In the teaching of the liberal wing of contemporary theology, we have a universalism which declares that all men are redeemed by Christ and reconciled to God, so that all that remains is to publicize this to them. In an article on universalism Harold Lindsell says: “Now the idea of some non-Christians being ‘in Christ’ has yielded to the conclusion that all men everywhere are ‘in Christ’ even though they may not be conscious of him; men need only to be made aware of this truth.” He quotes W. Norman Pittenger, James A. Pike, Nels Ferré, D. T. Niles, and W. O. Johnson to show that they are universalists in the above sense.

Such universalism is hardly compatible with biblical teaching. The Bible declares that the Gospel must be preached universally, that the death of Christ is sufficient and applicable for all but is efficacious only to those who believe. The Bible emphasizes the responsibility of acceptance of Christ. The plain alternative to this is the state of being lost and of suffering eternal torment. The Bible doctrine of torment and hell has thrust some into the belief in ultimate restorationism after a period of punishment and others to the belief in universalism of atonement and of the application of the Atonement. We must remember that the greatest emphasis upon hell and suffering as the alternative to salvation was made by the Lord Jesus Christ. If we give the proper emphasis to the responsibility of man, we have no problem with the doctrine of hell.

The Holy Spirit In Evangelism

Evangelism is dependent upon the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Contemporary theology discloses a new interest in and emphasis upon the Holy Spirit’s ministry. This applies not so much to the Spirit’s ministry in common grace as to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in special grace. The Holy Spirit restrains the destructive processes of sin and thus enables humanity to maintain an orderly life. The Holy Spirit also is the source of the renewing processes in the churches and in society. The emphasis upon spiritual renewal in the Roman Catholic Church and the various branches of Protestantism is directly attributable to the work of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has had a part in every stage of redemption, in creation, in revelation, in inspiration, in the Incarnation, in the Atonement, in the Resurrection, in the formation of the Church, in the missionary undertaking, in the prayer life of the believer, in the transformation of the believer into the image of Christ, and so on. His work is a prerequisite to effective evangelism.

Evangelism may be equated with the public proclamation of the good news of the Gospel or the private witnessing to the good news of the Gospel, with the purpose of bringing individuals to faith in and confession of Christ as Saviour. This is called “conversion,” and conversion has two meanings. It may be the active turning on the part of an individual as a response to the Gospel. This is the lesser sense of conversion and is within the ability of the individual. The New Testament uses the word epistrepho in the active tense. Theologically, conversion is often used in the larger sense of being equated with regeneration. This is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who convicts, converts, and transforms the life of the individual. There is no possibility of an evangelistic outreach without the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The twentieth century has seen the growth of the so-called third force, which is the Christian movement emphasizing the person and work of the Holy Spirit.

Regeneration, or the new birth by water and the Spirit (John 3:5), is the requirement for any spiritual and evangelistic movement. Jesus said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Too much religion omits the necessity of the new birth. Some theology minimizes the place of evangelism in regeneration. Some Lutherans and Anglicans teach baptismal regeneration. Some Reformed theologians teach that regeneration by the Holy Spirit precedes conversion. The evangelical position is that regeneration is conditioned upon repentance, confession, and faith. This alone stimulates evangelism.

The new emphasis upon the Holy Spirit is centered in the modern charismatic movement as it is seen in all the established denominations, especially the Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational. We must examine the validity of this movement. Some preclude the possibility of such validity by adopting the position that God withdrew these gifts after the apostolic days, so that they have not been the possession and the experience of the Church since. Historically, it is evident that the gifts were withdrawn and ceased to be manifested and practiced for a thousand years. But there is no biblical evidence requiring us to believe that God has withdrawn these gifts. If the curtain came down on the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit with the close of the apostolic era, there is nothing in the Scripture to indicate this. It is a conclusion drawn from history. On that same basis, we would have to retract the theory if gifts of the Spirit were historically manifested in these latter days.

It is irrefutable that the spiritual gifts were a part of the New Testament Christian experience (1 Cor. 12:4–31; 14:1–40; Eph. 4:7–16; Rom. 12:3–8). The manifestation of these gifts was experienced by those who were baptized with and filled with the Holy Spirit in the New Testament age. The claim is made today that these gifts are reappearing in the charismatic movement. Small groups of people are meeting for fellowship, worship, and the expression of these gifts in many areas of the world. Intelligent and responsible individuals have testified to receiving the gifts. Great evangelistic zeal and devotion have been manifested by those who proclaim to possess these gifts. This has created what is called “the third force.”

I believe that we cannot limit God by some preconceived theory that he cannot manifest the gifts of the Spirit in this age. I, personally, have not seen the manifestations of these gifts, especially the gift of healing and the gift of speaking in tongues. Should this movement prove valid and a modern manifestation of the supernatural, it could be an answer to the rationalists in the Church who accept no argument for the biblical faith and who even go so far as to proclaim in the name of Christianity that “God is dead.” God may be giving a supernatural demonstration that will confound unbelief.

A visitation of the Holy Spirit is the greatest need of the Church and of Christians today. Revival in the Church is contingent upon the visitation of the Spirit. We are encouraged to believe that the new emphasis upon the Holy Spirit’s person and ministry may very well be the prelude to revival. My understanding of the Bible is that revival can occur at any time up until the second advent of our Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 3:19–21). If we are to have this revival, we must not wait on the divine sovereignty, placing responsibility for the absence of spiritual visitation upon God. God uses means to bring about his purposes, and our dedication is not the least of these.

Is there any formula for us to fulfill in order to bring revival to reality? An analysis of New Testament experience and of historical revivals would suggest these prerequisites. First, united confession. It is essential that evangelicals confess their fragmentization, their divisions, their suspicions, their impotencies, their faithlessness, and their quarreling. Nothing will break down barriers faster than this. Second, we must have united prayer. The promises of Scripture are based upon such spiritual unity in prayer (Matt. 18:18–20; Isa. 45:11; 66:8). Third, there must be united believing (Mark 11:24; Matt. 21:21, 22). Fourth, there must be united witnessing (Acts 2:1, 11). All these conditions were fulfilled in the pre-Pentecostal prayer meetings of the apostles and disciples. In the proportion in which we fulfill them today, we may experience revival.

As the early and latter rain was promised in ancient Israel (Hosea 6:3) and as God promised to pour out his Spirit upon all flesh (Joel 2:28), we believe that we may experience times of refreshing in this age. Let us have faith in the promise of God, for with God nothing is impossible. Let us act upon this promise, depending upon the Holy Spirit to attend the good news with quickening power.

A German New Testament scholar stresses that the Risen Christ determined the manner and purpose of worldwide proclamation

1. The Basis of Authority

a. Authority for evangelism is grounded most deeply and finally in the risen Lord’s Great Commission (Matt. 28:19). He himself commanded the disciples to proclaim the Gospel to all nations and upon baptism to receive those who believe on him into the redeemed fellowship of the new covenant. He thus gave a comprehensive charge which bound not only them but all others as well who stand in his service to win the world for Christ!

This is the great objective he has placed before us. And he himself lends dignity to this command, for to him is given all power in heaven and in earth (Matt. 28:18). Through his disciples and messengers he is still continuing his earthly ministry: “As my Father hath sent me,” he says, “even so send I you” (John 20:21; see also John 17:18). This indicates that evangelism is intrinsic and essential to God’s plan of redemption. It is through evangelism that Jesus’ great prophetic vision is being realized: “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Matt. 24:14).

b. In his lifetime Jesus shared with chosen men the tasks committed to him by God, first with the twelve, then with the seventy: they were to proclaim the Gospel, heal the sick, and cast out demons as a sign that God’s Kingdom had dawned.

The ministry of the disciples was confined first of all to the Jews. Then, however, came Pentecost. And now began the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise: “Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Thus was clearly set forth the plan for spreading the Gospel. This procedure was not born of human genius, nor was it the product of some deliberate, far-flung missions strategy. No, it was the Lord himself who determined the manner and purpose of worldwide evangelism.

c. Through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit the disciples were granted power to carry out their commission. Peter’s mighty ministry on the Day of Pentecost is the first example of large-scale evangelism, and the miracle of tongues documents the beginning of worldwide missions, for representatives of all nations heard the message of salvation in their own language. The Spirit-filled message, in which God’s mighty works were proclaimed, brought about repentance, conversion, faith in Christ, and further building up of his Church. The broadcast seed of the Word yielded much fruit. The Gospel began its triumphal march throughout the world.

d. Then Antioch became the second great missionary center. Here, too, the Church placed itself completely under the effectual power of the Holy Spirit, who commanded: “Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them” (Acts 13:2). As the two accordingly embarked upon their ministry among the heathen, the Scriptures emphasize once again that they were sent out by the Holy Ghost (Acts 13:4).

e. Special blessing, moreover, attended the evangelistic and missionary labors of the Apostle Paul, to whom the risen Lord had appeared on the road to Damascus. The Lord had set him apart as a chosen vessel and had authorized him to declare His Name to heathen nations, to kings, and to the children of Israel (Acts 9:15). This commission was of unprecedented breadth and ecumenical importance, an entrustment that until his martyrdom Paul fulfilled with indefatigable faithfulness, holy passion, and sacrificial dedication.

The Apostle was gripped by a constraint that he could not shake. “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:16). He speaks of the incomparable greatness and indescribable glory of his service (2 Cor. 3:10), through which the bright light of the salvation message should illumine the hearts of men (2 Cor. 4:4). In proclaiming the Gospel, Paul did not limit himself to one fixed method—he was anything but a man of narrow vision. Instead, he adapted himself to the spiritual and religious condition of his listeners. Yet he never lost sight of the determinative objective—namely, to win as many as possible to Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 9:19–23). His strongly emphasized self-identification with the Jews and with the heathen was but a point of contact for witnessing to the one and only truth that is equally valid for all men.

The Apostle considered his apostolic office a priestly service; the heathen were to be an offering, as it were, well pleasing unto God and sanctified through the Holy Ghost (Rom. 15:16). He knew, too, that the results granted in his evangelistic work were not due to his own prowess but were to be credited rather to the Lord who has achieved them through him (2 Cor. 3:6). This was true not only of the authoritative message that he proclaimed, but also of the power of the signs and wonders that accompanied his proclamation. Thus through him and in most exemplary fashion, Jesus’ promise that the Gospel would be made known to all the world began to be fulfilled.

f. Besides Paul there were other favored men of early Christianity whom Christ set apart as apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers (Eph. 4:11). They knew that the Christ of whom they bore witness was Lord not only of his Church but also of the cosmos, the One who fills all the universe (Eph. 4:10), the heavenly Omnipotent One (Pantokrator) whose servants and messengers do his bidding.

g. Throughout the centuries and up to the present day, the Great Commission has retained its power to constrain and engage the Church of Jesus Christ. In him, and in him alone, we, too, find our authority for evangelism.

2. Essentials for an Authoritative Ministry

a. The same spiritual requisites pertain to evangelists as to anyone else who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. In conversion and regeneration they must have had a personal experience of salvation effected by the grace of God; they must believe on Jesus Christ with their whole being, must be in constant fellowship with him, by the power of the Holy Spirit must live a life dedicated to the Lord, and in word and deed must show themselves to be living members of the body of Christ. Certainly every Christian has the responsibility of being a gospel witness. This, however, does not make him an evangelist in the true sense of the word. For this he must have a special call.

b. Evangelism is a charisma, a gift of grace bestowed by the Holy Spirit. No one can determine to become an evangelist simply on the basis of his oratorical gifts. Fleshly ambition is absolutely out of place, as is even the desire to assume a leading role in the Church of Jesus Christ. Moreover, even a winning personality, or the ability to fascinate people and to spellbind them, does not make an evangelist. Assuredly God uses a person’s natural gifts and puts them into service. But woe to him who boasts of these gifts! They are meaningful to evangelism only if they are sanctified by God, for it is God himself who by his own free choice calls those who are to proclaim his Word and by the Holy Spirit equips them with the unique gift to become authoritative ministers of the Gospel.

No doubt Apollos had the gift of evangelism. He was a highly endowed man who had outstanding ability in public speaking, was well educated, and was also apt in expounding the Scriptures. His preaching left a deep impression on Corinth. He represents that kind of evangelist in whom strong natural propensities are combined with God’s special gift of grace.

And yet it was the oratorically less gifted Paul who became the outstanding charismatic personality of early Christianity. Characteristic of him was an apostolic consciousness of being sent and a full awareness of the meaning of the spiritual office entrusted to him. Paul was freely the lord of all things; yet like no other he was a servant of Jesus Christ. He was at once humble and regal, a man who never boasted of his privileges and advantages. Once when it was necessary, he even called himself a fool (2 Cor. 11:1–12, 18). He was a man of Christ who felt responsibility only to the Lord (Kyrios) of heaven and followed his instructions. He was accountable to no “missionary committee.”

Paul was not a charming speaker who captivated the hearts of his listeners, nor was he a forceful evangelist by natural disposition. His enemies, while they probably exaggerated the situation and spoke in spite, said of him: “He’s no speaker in any sense of the word!” (“His speech is contemptible”) (2 Cor. 10:10; see also 2 Cor. 11:6). At times his mien was far from impressive and his bearing lacked self-confidence.

In First Corinthians 2:1–4 Paul confesses openly and in all modesty that he came to Corinth, that famous metropolis of the East, with no intention whatever of proclaiming the Gospel with overwhelming eloquence or show of human wisdom. This educated theologian who had been thoroughly trained in the School of the Torah at Jerusalem and besides this was well-versed in Hellenistic culture deliberately made no use at Corinth of this extensive knowledge; his one and only concern was to bear witness to Jesus Christ and him crucified. Unlike the wandering philosophers of that day, Paul did not try to strike an impressive pose; he came, rather, “in weakness,” yes, even “with fear” and “great timidity.” But he bore a message that surpassed all the wisdom of the world and proclaimed it in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Thus the Gospel and its indwelling power was fully vindicated and actively manifested. Paul knew the danger that threatens an evangelist who seeks personal prominence; to do so undermines the authority of the message.

c. Paul teaches us that our evangelistic preaching must be Christocentric. Obviously we will treat many and diverse themes, for after all we must be aware of our times and preach accordingly. That is, we must know people’s questions, problems, and needs and must come to grips with them. Any evangelist who evades or ignores the current, concrete world in which he lives has failed his calling. He must be ready for questions and answers. This he can do only if he is thoroughly trained, possesses broad knowledge, and is sensitive to every facet of people’s lives. This concern is also essential for authoritative preaching. But evangelism that does not make Christ and his salvation central, that does not press for conversion and definite decision, has fallen short of its purpose. Evangelism without commitment is no evangelism at all but only a kind of religious activity.

d. Paul taught us also how we are to evangelize. What words and concepts we use is no matter of indifference. Repeatedly the Apostle warned against language prompted by human wisdom; philosophical speech, after all, cannot properly delineate the content of the Gospel. Paul therefore emphasizes and stresses that in “comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Cor. 2:13), we must use words given us by the Holy Spirit. By this he means that the manner of our proclamation—yes, even our choice of words—is not a matter of personal determination. It derives from and is pressed in upon us by what we are to proclaim.

Paul was the first to recognize today’s very real problem of “theological communication” (Sprachtheologie) and met it in the only correct way. This, too, belongs to authoritative preaching. Otherwise it becomes very simple to adulterate the Gospel. For our day this simply means that in presenting the redemptive message we cannot take up the modern mode of existential philosophy and theology, whose anthropological purpose limits or obscures the Gospel. Where this sort of approach leads is seen with frightening clarity in Bishop Robinson’s book, Honest to God. German theologian W. Künneth, who believes in revelation, points out in his publication, Von Gott Reden?, that while Robinson has purported to bring the Gospel to “modern” man, in reality he has destroyed the Gospel.

e. Let us cite a concrete example from today’s evangelistic scene. Dr. E. Bieneck is a leading German businessman who is also president of the German YMCA and has an excellent overview of the present situation and of the Church’s impact in Germany. In Bibel und evangelische Kirche (1956) he states: “I can only say, that in the course of my life I have verified time and again that the more simply the message of the cross is proclaimed, the greater are the results; this is true also today.” Billy Graham’s work is the best proof of this fact.

f. If the evangelistic sermon is essentially Christocentric, then it will be properly related to all of Holy Scripture. From this center it will encompass the entire wealth of divine revelation and the fullness of redemption. From this centrality, too, it will derive its authoritative judgment of man and his entire godless, salvationless, and sinful existence. At the same time Christocentric preaching will appropriate scientific findings concerning man, which are very noteworthy indeed, findings that give a kind of insight as well as a measure of practical help. This benefit is undeniable; but redemption in Christ, these findings cannot provide.

3. The Purpose of Authoritative Evangelism

a. Proclamation of the Gospel begins with the idea that there is only one salvation for all mankind—namely, salvation in Christ. For “neither is there salvation in any other” (Acts 4:12). This basic statement establishes the purpose of evangelism once and for all: to win men for Christ. Evangelism therefore is the determinative saving action for a lost world. Through evangelism God offers the world the salvation that in his fathomless love he has prepared in Christ Jesus.

But the Gospel is more than an offer of love; it has a mysterious unique dynamic, for everyone who believes the message of the Cross becomes a power of God (1 Cor. 1:18). Since the Gospel contains God’s entire plan of salvation, it demands obedience (Rom. 10:16). It comes with a universal appeal; God desires that all men be helped and that they come to awareness of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). Man’s fate in time and eternity depends on his acceptance or rejection of the offer of redemption (2 Thess. 1:8 f). There is no other way of salvation.

b. Evangelism is an imperatively essential task, for opposition to the Gospel grows apace in a most frightening manner.

Today we are experiencing a constantly ongoing process of secularization. The world, as it had been rightly said, is becoming ever more worldly. This state is due to both secret and open revolt from God that culminates in political ideologies and world-views tied up with atheism to the very point of enmity toward God and Christ and persecution of the Church. Without yielding the battle in so many words, even so-called Christian countries abandon faith in God. For many people, God no longer has any practical significance. People live without him and, apparently, make out very well. After all, it is said, God hinders man’s free development.

In truth, however, when a man surrenders his ties to God he does not become really free; rather, he plunges all the more deeply into the grip of satanic-demonic powers. He loses every moral norm and creates his own rules for living, rules that are often his very undoing. Deification of power, of money, of material possessions, of sex brings him not salvation but rather destruction. He falls prey to lusts, passions, and desires and becomes enmeshed in sins and guilt. Our so-called pluralistic society no longer has any determinative life core or centrality; it is subservient rather to the spirit of this world, the spirit that rules the sons of disobedience (Eph. 2:2). While the world indeed mobilizes spiritual and moral forces in opposition, it cannot delay or vanquish the doom that has broken upon mankind in all areas of life.

c. In this situation, the Church of Jesus Christ must rally its powers all the more to proclaim the message of salvation with every possible means. It will not become discouraged even if its witness brings sufferings and martyrdom, for at its side stands the Lord who has promised: “I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20). Moreover, the Apostle Paul’s declaration will always be valid: “The word of God is not bound” (2 Tim. 2:9; compare 2 Thess. 3:1). Christ himself gathers together his Church through the Word that declares him to be the crucified, risen One who lives forevermore.

4. The Biblical-Theological Basis

Now we come to a very real problem. Because of certain impacts upon present-day theology (by Bultmann and others), the matter of proper and currently relevant proclamation confronts us anew. This matter is of determinative significance not only for preaching in the churches but also for evangelism.

We have already touched on the question briefly but must now interact with it more extensively. In so doing we do not wish to deal in detail with the problem identified by the keyword “demythologizing,” but will rather limit ourselves to intensive discussion of the phase that relates directly to our topic. This actually concerns the method and practical execution of evangelism; in the last analysis it concerns the Gospel itself. This matter is tremendously vital, because preaching today already contains much that is different from what we can subscribe to in obedience to the clear witness of the Word of God.

The best approach to the problem is from the vantage point of a passage in one of Paul’s letters, Second Corinthians 5:19–21, because it plays a big part in helping us orient ourselves about the question under consideration and brings opposing viewpoints to light. Paul’s exposition is dominated by three declarations:

a. The first states: “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself.”

This is the basic statement of the Christian doctrine of salvation as presented by Paul. He ascertains a historical event of revolution accomplished by God that eliminates any and all human initiative and activity. By free decree according to the riches of his grace, God gave his Son to die as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world; and in obedience to God’s will, Christ took upon himself the sacrifice that brought redemption to lost mankind. This is the unique, once-for-all, unrepeatable fact, valid for all time.

Although witnessed to throughout the entire New Testament, this event is dimmed in modern existential theology, robbed of its worth, or even denied. But to deny the reality of redemption facts is to pull the very foundation out from Christian faith. For Bultmann, the cross of Christ has meaning only as it serves man’s existential self-realization: I must decide to take up the cross of Christ as my own. Robinson speaks similarly. He does not see a redemptive provision of God in the cross of Christ, puts aside the theory of the atonement, and in his theology comes to the conclusion accordingly that the cross of Christ is only an evidence of Jesus’ selflessness, of a love that gives itself to and unites itself with the ground of being (Seinsgrund). To do this is to rob the cross of Christ of its determinative substance. The statements of the New Testament are falsified to benefit an unbiblically oriented Christology.

The redemptive historical event of Jesus’ resurrection is closely related to the salvation fact of Christ’s death; for if Christ had not risen, then the saving and redemptive work of God would lose its meaning. Therefore Paul declares in First Corinthians 15:17 that if there were no resurrected Christ, then we should still be in our sins. But the apostles do indeed witness, and in full agreement, that God raised his son from the dead.

That there has been no resurrection of Jesus as a historical event is another item of contention among representatives of extentialist theology. This, they say, is mythological speech; to them the concept of a historical resurrection is irreconcilable with today’s scientific view of the universe. This concept must therefore be given up. Only the appearances of the “Resurrected One” are historically ascertainable, they say; but no one can say with certainty of what kind they were and just how they took place among the disciples. It is presumed impossible to speak of an immediate intervention of God; to do so would contradict our modern concept of God, for which the fact of God’s transcendence and personal being have become irrelevant.

Nonetheless—and this is what is so corrupt and deceiving—existential theology does maintain a concept of the resurrection. Christ, so the new interpretation says, was not raised to a new, glorified being but—says Bultmann—was resurrected into kerygma. That is, Christ does not continue to live as a person in a changed form but is ever present in the proclaimed Word.

But how can he be active in proclamation if he does not actually exist, inasmuch as his death ended everything? This “kerygmatic Christ” has no reality whatsoever, nor is he identified with the historical Jesus of Nazareth; rather he is a fictitious greatness of some kind with which there is no fellowship, and to which one cannot pray. That is not the Lord to whom is given all power in heaven and on earth. Bultmann explicitly declares: “I must admit that I consider any talk about the personal aspect of Christ as mythology.” Thus here, too, the redemptive-historical foundation of proclamation is removed. The biblical message is totally falsified. An evangelism that falls for this sort of talk is totally without authority.

b. Paul’s second declaration states: “God has set up among us the Word of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:19).

This indicates, further, that God himself has done something also in reference to the proclamation. In that he has established the Word of reconciliation, he has determined the content of the message. He who proclaims, whether he be preacher or evangelist, therefore has no freedom to dispense the divine Word as he will. He is bound to firm instructions. As a “messenger in Christ’s place,” he, like any ambassador, has his orders to carry out in the manner he has been instructed. That is, he is not permitted to project his own religious ideas, concoct more or less clever speculations, or engage in philosophical conjecture.

In reference to our discussion this means that he has no right to interpret the soteriological statements of the New Testament in merely anthropological or existential terms. To do this is to destroy them, for what is “meant” is only that which is there recorded, not that which is read into or out of the texts with the help of a certain exegetical method. The task of proclamation is first of all to witness to the great acts of God; it must tell the world what God has fulfilled in Christ for the redemption of the world. Only when proclamation has presented the basic events of the incarnation, of the cross, and of the resurrection of Christ can preaching say what these facts mean for us. Most certainly that which has occurred extra nos (totally independent of us) has occurred pro nobis (for our good). But it is impossible to speak of the “significance” of the salvation facts—that is, of the meaning they have for us—if they themselves are disregarded or even denied. If this happens, the kerygma becomes a “free-floating” Word. When the kerygma is stripped of its revelational-historical foundation, it simply dangles in thin air.

That to which everything tends, in the last analysis, becomes clear in today’s well-loved and modern German theology’s much-used concept of Wortgeschehen. What is questionable about this? At first glance, nothing. Like many theological slogans of our time, the term das Wortgeschehen is not a particularly happy expression. One could accept it, however, if it indicated that proclamation of the Word is an event brought about by the Holy Ghost, an event that brings about the decisive turning point in the life of someone who accepts it by faith.

But in existential theology much more than this is meant. The Wortgeschehen becomes the central and our only valid salvation event. This has logical consequences. For if the Tatgeschehen (the cross and resurrection of Christ) are declared unimportant for us or made totally devoid of value, then only that proclamation which confronts me relevantly here and now in my concrete existence can have decisive importance. Past history that has lost its redemptive-historical nature by virtue of this new concept of historicity is considered at best but a “redeeming moment” for the present. Because of this interpretation, Bultmann rejects any return to history behind the kerygma.

In the New Testament, by contrast, kerygma means message, proclamation, solemn impartation of facts that have occurred. So Paul understood the message of the Cross. It announced that act of God through which he reconciled the world unto himself. For this very reason it is the power of God (1 Cor. 1:18) that brings redemption and salvation to all who believe (Rom. 1:16). At the same time it is the total sum and substance of divine wisdom (1 Cor. 1:24), which appears as foolishness to unbelievers but which in truth is wiser than all human wisdom (1 Cor. 1:25). Consequently the Apostle tirelessly and zealously proclaims the crucified Christ (1 Cor. 1:22), in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins (Eph. 1:7). Beyond this Paul witnesses to the unfathomable riches in Christ (Eph. 1:8), in whom dwells the entire fullness of God (Col. 2:9)—that Christ who is the likeness of God, the firstborn of all creation and the firstborn of the dead (Col. 1:14–20); the Lord of all and of the Church, that Lord who at his return in power and glory will usher in the fulfillment of redemption. If evangelism is to be authoritative, it must carry forward this true message of Christ.

c. Paul’s third declaration states: “Be ye reconciled to God.” This is an invitation; it is also a mighty summons to an unregenerate, lost world. It personally addresses each one who hears the word of reconciliation. Authoritative evangelism would not fulfill its task completely unless it confronted men with a final, inescapable decision.

Existential theology likewise knows a concept of decision and takes it most seriously. Its aim is to lead man to “reality,” to a proper understanding of himself, to a true god-willed existence. It speaks, too, of the sin-pardoning grace of God which gives man access to a new future. There is no word, however, of Christ’s atonement as the redemptive-historical foundation of God’s forgiving activity.

Paul does not ask man to reconcile himself to God; man is in no position to do this. In Christ, God has accomplished everything needful for man’s salvation. Lost in his sin and guilt, man needs only to accept the completed reconciliation and apply it to himself. Through conversion which leads him to living faith in God and Christ, a new existence—life in Christ—is given him by grace. Zinzendorf’s watchword is still valid for the evangelist today: “My joy until I die: to win souls for the Lamb.”

If properly understood and not existentially misconstrued, Paul’s three statements in Second Corinthians contain all that belongs to the nature and realization of authoritative evangelism.

To refocus the twentieth-century Church’s sight on the great commission of Jesus Christ, more than a thousand Christian leaders will be meeting in Berlin for prayer, panels, and planning sessions in the famous Congress Hall October 26 to November 4. Delegates to the World Congress on Evangelism include evangelistically concerned clergy and laymen from all races and from around the globe, from modern frontier tribes and from Christendom’s most ancient churches. The Auca Indians of Ecuador, whose tiny band of believers sprang from the blood of recent missionary martyrs, are represented, as is the Mar Thoma Church in India, which ascribes its origin to the first-century apostle Thomas.

The congress theme is “One Race, One Gospel, One Task.” Proceedings will be simultaneously translated into English, French, German, and Spanish. A few special-interest sub-sections will be conducted only in Japanese.

Many delegates consider the gathering the most significant opportunity for evangelistic planning in the modern era, and they fervently hope it will light the fuse for a worldwide evangelistic explosion. In the first century the Jerusalem Council thrust the gospel witness beyond the Jewish world to the Gentiles; in this century, the Berlin Congress will consider global evangelism in the context of a nuclear, space, and mass-communications era.

In contrast to previous world missionary conferences held in the forepart of this century, the World Congress on Evangelism brings together nationals who themselves carry the burden of evangelism on home terrains around the earth.

Unlike other recent major religious gatherings—such as the Vatican Council, World Council of Churches assemblies, Faith and Order conferences, or Church and Society conferences—the World Congress on Evangelism has one overarching aim: to see the fragmented world in relation to the universal need for the New Testament Gospel and Christ’s unrescinded command to evangelize the earth. The congress is not oriented to any one ecclesiastical agency; participants have been invited without regard for ecumenical position. The congress does not claim to speak for any grouping of contemporary churches; rather, it is a platform that makes visible the devout determination of multitudes of evangelical Christians to proclaim the Gospel to their contemporaries.

The theme of Christian witness to God’s saving grace will be uppermost in the minds of the participants, from the morning prayer meetings and Bible hours throughout the day into the evening addresses by leading evangelists from five continents. An hour of group discussion, to be held in six different meeting rooms simultaneously, is part of the daily program.

As background for this discussion, involving all the delegates, distinguished evangelical spokesmen are presenting panel position papers (published in this issue on pages 4–39) on “The Authority for Evangelism” (Prof. Johannes Schneider, formerly of the faculty of Humboldt University, East Berlin); “The Theology of Evangelism” (Dr. Harold John Ockenga, minister of Park Street Church, Boston, Massachusetts); “The Hindrances to Evangelism in the Church” (Dr. Walter Künneth, professor of systematic theology, Erlangen University, Germany); “The Obstacles to Evangelism in the World” (Dr. Harold B. Kuhn, professor of philosophy of religion, Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Kentucky); “The Methods of Personal Evangelism” (Dr. Richard C. Halverson of Washington, D. C., executive director of International Christian Leadership); and “The Methods of Group Evangelism” (Bishop A. W. Goodwin Hudson, of London).

These six papers will prepare the way for thirty-six panels (each with four participants) on special facets of interest. An hour of open discussion will follow each panel.

On the following pages, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, which is sponsoring the World Congress on Evangelism as its tenth-anniversary project, shares the panel position papers with its readers to anticipate the drive and drama of the congress. If Christians around the world heed the plea of the congress to unite in a bold and winsome presentation of the Good News, the twentieth-century world will be spectacularly confronted with a prospect of peace and hope and joy that men and women of all races and lands may share.

The eyes of much of the Christian world these days are on Berlin, where the World Congress on Evangelism convenes October 26 to November 4. Evangelicals pray for signs of victory and tongues of fire, and they wait for man-made walls to tumble—walls segregating races, walls dividing nations, walls embittering social classes, and, not least of all, walls separating believers. Their concern of concerns, however, is the removal of the wall of hostility between man and God, and the driving urgency of fulfilling the Great Commission.

The Berlin Kongresshalle seats 1,300 participants—delegates, observers, press. From more than 100 nations around the earth, evangelists and other Christian leaders are searching their souls in view of parting instructions that the Risen Christ gave to his followers.

This may be the last time in our generation such a world conclave is possible.

But the future of Christian evangelism depends not simply upon Christ’s disciples’ gathering in Berlin.

No question now presses more insistently upon the evangelical conscience than this: In view of Jesus Christ’s Great Commission, what is the most important step my local church ought to take—beginning this very week?

Evangelism, rightly called “the lifeline of Christianity” and the central task of the Christian Church, is getting much attention these days. This is especially significant in view of the confident assertion by religious leaders of the thirties that “personal evangelism” was dead.

Of course, not all who are now discussing evangelism are dealing with the historic mandate of the Church to proclaim Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. Some are attempting to deprive the term “evangelism” of its clarity and vitality.

There is a tendency to set in antithesis an “evangelism of decision” and an “evangelism of identification.” The implications of this are clear. Evangelism concerned directly with the individual and his spiritual anxieties and hungers is regarded as aloof, unrelated to the realities of the time, and hence irrelevant. We are asked to believe that evangelism that leaves the chancel and moves into the streets (particularly for protests and demonstrations) is now the only type worthy of the name. As the Christian becomes an active part of power-movements for social betterment, we are told, he is best displaying the heart of Christianity.

Granted, the Gospel, when true to our Lord’s example, is concerned with the needs of the poor and the disinherited. Not granted, however, is the contention, often recklessly made, that historic evangelism at its best is insensitive to the needs of those who have been left behind in the march of progress. Even persons who are unenthusiastic about Dr. Billy Graham will, if they are fair, admit that he is vitally concerned about the problems that plague today’s society, such as urbanization and ghetto living.

Part of the problem is to define the task. Has social change made it necessary to view the Church’s mandate to evangelize in a wholly new way? Some will heartily reply, Yes! They will say that if we are to “do the work of an evangelist” in our day, we must focus our attention, not on the spiritual needs of the individual, but on the processes of social change. Presumably we must do this to ensure that such change will be carried out in a way that can be called “Christian.”

In past days, the Church, as witnessing Church, was generally thought to stand in some sense over the world. In the name of its Lord it was to declare an unchanging message centering in the constancy of human sin, the certainty of God’s love and grace, and the urgency of the redeeming ministry of Jesus Christ. Today many influential people are urging the Church to surrender its claim to call all men to repentance (and thus to sit in judgment upon the whole of human life) and to take its place as one of several agencies of power in our society.

Perhaps it is time for the “identifying church” to search its heart and decide whether the demands of its avant-garde reflect any special, contemporary mandate from the Lord of the Church. It might well inquire, in the “morning after” of frustrated anti-poverty programs and bitter demands for “black power,” whether evil in society can be financed or demonstrated out of existence. The liberal church might also ask itself whether it is qualified to undertake a twentieth-century Constantinianism—to assume direct responsibility for directing our society.

Not many will go so far as one worldly prelate who proclaimed that individual evangelism urging personal commitment to Christ was “unchristian.” The more usual attitude is to regard the evangelist who “preaches for a verdict” at the personal level as the “prisoner of an outmoded theology” or as one who “unduly limits the scope and sphere of the Gospel.” No tabulation of ecclesiastical power will determine what is right. True, much liberal “social action” today has been sparked by frustration at the slow progress made by secular agencies. But is not much “action” proving itself to be frustrating? The proponent of “evangelism by identification” must be disturbed to hear that Western assistance to underdeveloped nations is “self-serving” and that acceptance of it is “harlotry with capitalist lands.”

The issue before the Church seems to be this: Are we to accept the New Testament mandate to “preach the Gospel to every creature,” or are we to accept the revised definition of evangelism proposed by ideologists whose views are conditioned almost entirely by a socio-political creed?

If “there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved,” then every man deserves to hear that message regardless of his religious or cultural background. Certainly this proclamation should be made humbly and lovingly; but it must be made, even in the face of a hostile world and an antagonistic Zeitgeist. Certainly the ministering evangelist should, as far as possible, separate himself from considerations of race and color. Certainly he ought to separate himself from the instruments of prejudice and injustice. Certainly he ought to interest himself, and those within range of his witness, in the financial structures that control trade and wealth among nations. But his major concern must be to relate the unchanging Revelation to man’s needs in a changing world.

Methods may vary, but principles remain. The problem of human sin and guilt and anxiety; the imperious need for divine forgiveness; the essential need of lonely man for relation with God through Jesus Christ—these are constant. No religious appeal is permanently relevant if it fails to come to grips with these constants. Accelerated technology makes human need no less urgent; a society conditioned more and more by cybernetics leaves men in no less need of the light and warmth of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, since more and more of man’s basic decisions seem to come from invisible, impersonal sources, personal decision and commitment in “core matters” are the more urgent.

The Cross has more than one meaning. It means hope, and in this we rejoice. But it also means offense. He who will “do the work of an evangelist” must willingly reckon with resistance to his message. He needs only to be certain that his presentation of Christ and his cross is made in love and humility.

The promise, “Lo, I am with you always,” is rooted in the command to evangelize. This should sustain the evangelist in the face of opposition, including that which questions whether his message is relevant for the times. He might also remember that organized Christianity may sink into decay, irrelevance, and finally extinction in several ways, and that one way is thoughtless identification.—

A review of the momentous news stories during CHRISTIANITY TODAY’S first ten years suggests that the magazine could have chosen no opening decade more strategic.

Reporting of intellectual, moral, and spiritual news is hazardous because significance often lies as much in broad trends as in specific events and personalities. This, plus the sheer bulk of the news, makes it virtually impossible to compile a useful list of “top stories.” Instead, we point to ten great dynamic forces that affected Christianity and were affected by Christianity during our first decade of publication:

Quest For Racial Justice

As newly independent nations arose, Christian nationals across the world assumed management of their churches as never before. In an era of racial interaction and new freedom, South Africa epitomized white intransigence.

In America, a political revolution began with Negro Christians and drew increasing support as a moral issue from white clergymen. From Martin Luther King’s bus boycott, the movement went on to attack a multitude of sins, but barely touched long-term problems of employment, education, housing, and family stability.

Public shock at police brutality and pressure from churchmen led to major national civil rights laws. While public institutions gradually integrated, the color line within Protestantism generally stood fast. A backlash of bigotry accompanied excesses in the Negro struggle while Gandhian non-violence faded as the reigning rationale.

The Ecumenical Tide

A new spirit of unity on a pan-Christian scale was possible because of a moderating Roman Catholicism. The attitude of Eastern Orthodoxy was more ambiguous. In a decade full of ecumenical “firsts,” intra-Protestant mergers created the new United Presbyterian Church, American Lutheran Church, Lutheran Church in America, and United Church of Christ. The United Church, which cut across confessional lines, lost members during the decade; growth was more typical of Baptists, Pentecostals, and other non-ecumenical independents.

In 1960 Eugene Carson Blake, later chosen general secretary of the World Council of Churches, proposed a dramatic U. S. Protestant merger. By 1966, delegates from nine denominations with 25 million members had approved union principles. In world missions, the International Missionary Council merged with the WCC, and cooperation grew among independents outside the WCC.

The New Face Of Roman Catholicism

Some have said that Pope Pius XII had planned to call a council. It probably would have rapped the Reds, endorsed the past, and promulgated new Marian dogma. But Pope John’s Vatican Council II gave surprising vent to Rome’s liberal element and such thinkers as Küng and Murray. It recast attitudes toward Protestants, Jews, revelation, and church-state relations, and updated church structure and worship. But the ecumenical barricades of mariology and papal infallibility remained tough problems of implementation and such unresolved issues as birth control fell to John’s successor, Pope Paul VI.

Another John, named Kennedy, became the first of his faith elected to the U. S. Presidency. His performance in office assuaged anti-Catholics and contributed to the new interfaith climate.

Shifts In Church-State Relations

Centuries-old patterns of church-state relations changed in many countries. The major spur to this was Vatican II’s religious freedom document, which weakened ancient papal agreements with certain governments. In Catholic Spain and Latin America and in Orthodox Greece, priests berated the government. Lutheran Scandinavia reconsidered the official churches’ status, and in Britain, government ties seemed increasingly an albatross for Anglicanism.

In the United States, the Supreme Court increased separation, if not secularism, with two key rulings on prayer and Bible reading in public schools. But in a contrasting trend, long-standing church-state walls crumbled as Congress gave federal aid to parochial schools, religious colleges, and church-related poverty agencies.

The Cold War’S Move East

As Red China became a nuclear force and a growing threat to world peace, she drew apart from her onetime ally, the Soviet Union. The thaw between the Soviet Union and the West was seen in Khrushchev’s tour of America and the entry of Russian Orthodoxy into the World Council of Churches. Rome was more conciliatory toward Moscow but was unable to become a diplomatic third force between East and West. The United Nations—which was visited by a pope for the first time last year—seemed to wane as such a third force.

A crude anti-Communist reaction survived in some segments of the Church and society, but other Christians were more concerned that the Communist Bloc remained the most challenging unevangelized area on earth. The ambiguous Viet Nam war succeeded World War II and Korea, where the moral issues were clearer; some churchmen opposed the war and favored a new, selective form of pacifism.

Science Tamed And Unleashed

In the decade of Sputnik and of the advent of man in space, science increased its dominance over philosophy and the humanities in the academic world, a trend accentuated by federal aid. Even art forms were increasingly mechanistic, as in electronic music and Op Art.

Scientific advance continued to create crises men were unprepared to handle, in automation, a surplus of unskilled labor, and a surplus of leisure, particularly in America. And science left unsolved the great moral questions created by new knowledge in such fields as medicine and genetic control. Who would make life-and-death decisions, and on what criteria?

An Uneasy Moral Climate

The “new morality” and situational ethics gave an air of respectability to what people intended to do anyway. The new Playboy empire and less urbane p*rnographers made millions on permissiveness endorsed by some churchmen. Men sought escape from their environment through such exotic means as LSD. More traditional misuse of narcotics continued, as did such old-fashioned problems as alcoholism, gambling, marriage breakdown, and plain dishonesty.

It was easier to lie, cheat, and steal in an impersonal, institutionalized society than in small-town America. A surge in all types of crime accompanied such chilling specifics as mass murders and aimless rioting. The assassination of John F. Kennedy was the worst single crime of the decade; Adolph Eichmann’s trial and execution were a reminder of past outrages.

Secularization Of The Church

An important element in Protestantism struggled to break out of institutional cocoons, often not to proclaim but to serve and to change social structures. The United Presbyterians’ new confession, with its “reconciliation” theme, was symptomatic of the search for the idiom of the age. Secular theology and relativism were exaggerated in the small but much-discussed “death of God” school.

Church lobbies in Washington, D. C., tended to overshadow activities by individual Christian citizens, and political pronouncements from church assemblies became commonplace. The churches also had another important link with the secular world—billions of dollars in equity—and use of these resources was an open question.

Demand For Depth Evangelism

In Christian theology and in evangelism and education, there was marked probing beyond the more obvious elementary issues. The decade’s foremost proclaimer of the Gospel, Billy Graham, led the way by intensifying his preparation and follow-up. Hit-or-miss witness was gradually yielding to what might be called “contextual evangelism,” in which the right to be heard is first won by identifying with needs and attitudes. The proliferation of means of communication brought many new opportunities but generally worked against the personal touch.

The World Congress on Evangelism, with its not-by-design forerunner, the Congress on the Church’s Worldwide Mission, represents a broad new move toward coordinated evangelistic strategy.

End Of A Generation Of Giants

Great religious thinkers died in this decade: C. S. Lewis, then Schweitzer, Tillich, and Brunner. Another major figure who died was Sartre, existentialism’s leading exponent of despair. Giants of Christian thought were at the close of their careers: Barth, Bultmann, Niebuhr, and Maritain.

During these years, neo-orthodoxy declined as an intellectual option, largely because of its wavering sense of divine revelation and biblical authority. In an ecumenical age, major denominations reflected an eclectic, tolerant atmosphere, without indignation even toward heresy. Protestantism was groping for meaning and direction and was uncertain which concepts and personalities would condition the new era.

Personalia

A high churchman, Archbishop Philip N. W. Strong of Brisbane, was elected primate of the Church of England in Australia. He succeeds Dr. Hugh R. Gough, an evangelical who resigned both an archbishopric and the primacy because of illness. The 67-year-old Strong, a bachelor, was born in England and served twenty-seven years as bishop of Papua, New Guinea.

Dr. Ronald Osborn, dean of Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, was named president-elect of the International Convention of Christian Churches.

Alabama-born C. Eugene Kratz was chosen president of Maryland Baptist College, now being built on a 140-acre site forty miles west of Baltimore. Kratz has been a researcher for the U. S. Office of Education and a Southern Baptist educational missionary to Southern Rhodesia. He earned a doctorate from Teachers College of Columbia University in college and university administration.

Miscellany

South Viet Nam’s new constitutional assembly includes 30 Roman Catholics among its 117 members. Buddhist candidates won 34 of the seats, according to Religious News Service. Only two or three of the Buddhists, however, are rated as supporters of the militant monk Thich Tri Quang (see Sept. 30 issue, page 18).

Pollster Louis Harris said last month that U. S. Catholics favor Robert Kennedy over Lyndon Johnson by a 60–40 ratio for Democratic Presidential candidate in 1968. Protestants, he reported, prefer Johnson 53 to 47. Harris said Catholics go for Kennedy over Richard Nixon 66 to 34, Jews for Kennedy over Nixon by 70 to 30, and Protestants for Nixon over Kennedy by 58 to 42.

Methodism’s controversial student monthly motive has agreed to be the magazine for the new ecumenical University Christian Movement (see Sept. 30 issue, page 16). Evangelical Press Association and Evangelical Literature Overseas plan a joint effort to give a push to Christian communications in higher education, including counseling service, promotion of scholarship programs, and exchange of information on career opportunities.

Canada releases a new Christmas stamp this week showing a reproduction of “Praying Hands,” a famous drawing by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. The stamp will come in denominations of three cents (rose-colored) and five cents (orange).

Even the most blasé motion picture viewers will be impressed by the sheer audacity of producer Dino De Laurentiis and director John Huston in attempting a project of the magnitude of The Bible … in the Beginning, a color film that premiered in New York City September 28. What these intrepid gentlemen have sought to do is compress the stories of the Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, the Tower of Babel, the destruction of Sodom, and Abraham and Sarah into one three-hour roll of celluloid. That they have not scored a major triumph is unimportant. The marvel is that they have succeeded as well as they have.

From Christopher Fry’s terse screenplay, which draws heavily on King James biblical language, Huston has strung together six episodes whose continuity depends on his own reading, both for the narration and the voice of God. Following a scenario of particularized, literal images rather than poetic ambiguity, Huston presents a tasteful film that only occasionally offends with sensational devices.

The six episodes, however, have an uneven quality that prevents a steady development to a climax. Though The Bible has several scenes of great dramatic force—and, in George C. Scott’s portrayal of Abraham, an exhibition of disciplined and perceptive acting—its fatal flaw is that one leaves the theater impressed by aspects of the film but without a deep sense of the glory of the Creator revealed in the pages of Genesis.

The Creation unfolds as the narrator speaks and the amorphous, undulating masses of fog, fingers of light, volcanic eruptions, and swirling waters move across the screen. It culminates in the creation of Adam, uniquely accomplished as the wind blows on a shapeless earthen mass until a human form is distinguishable and flesh appears. The human body, discreetly nude, is seen as the noblest part of God’s creation. Beautiful in its dignity and power, the entire creation sequence elicits a sense of awe.

Adam and Eve fail to come across either as profoundly innocent or as grievously fallen characters. They are played two-dimensionally by Michael Parks and Ulla Bergryd, whose acting ability is less impressive than their splendid physiques. The temptation scene is a dud in its lack of dramatic intensity. But surprisingly, the difficult task of portraying the serpent is carried off quite effectively: Satan has a humanlike form all but hidden in the shadows of the luxuriant Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, on which hangs the glistening golden apple. Conspicuous by their absence are the garments of skins in which God clothed Adam and Eve before they were driven from the Garden.

Richard Harris as Cain offers an unconvincing caricature of the fleeing vagabond who tries to escape his tormenting guilt. In one of the unfortunate bits of sensationalism of the film, lightning strikes Cain causing a mark shaped like the Tree to appear on his forehead.

Noah, played by director Huston himself, is a man of quiet strength with a twinkle in his eye. He gives no hint of being a raging prophet of God’s judgment but is a wise, persistent man of faith who builds his ark despite the taunting of a mob of men, each of whom resembles the Swedish Angel of wrestling fame. Like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, Noah tootles the bright beasts and his drab family aboard the rough-hewn place of refuge. The Noah sequence is disproportionately long, but it is nevertheless entertaining and, with the climactic return of the dove with the fig leaf, inspirational.

The Tower of Babel scene is perhaps the weakest part of The Bible. Nimrod stands atop the high-rise ziggurat and shoots an arrow high into the heavens as an act of pride in defiance of God. Suddenly a great turbulence occurs in the clouds. When Nimrod speaks to his men, they reply in gibberish. The crowds below begin to quarrel, the tower tumbles, and the people flee—all in the space of a few moments.

The picture saves for the last its best episode, the saga of Abraham and Sarah. George C. Scott brilliantly portrays the Patriarch as a man of humanity, virility, and faith. The attractiveness of Sarah (played by Ava Gardner), who at seventy-five appears more like a mature girl of twenty-five, may have contributed to Abraham’s soundness of spirit.

The screenplay takes the liberty of allowing Abraham to show young Isaac the ruins of Sodom where God’s judgment has been rendered. Here the film reaches its dramatic high point as Abraham (using words found in the book of Isaiah) raves before God before obediently ascending the mountain of sacrifice to offer his son. After God interrupts the uplifted blade of Abraham and provides a ram caught in the thicket for the sacrifice, father and son embrace in a touching show of love. Then, true to the form of biblical epochs, the picture ends with the camera cliché of a sweeping view of the crimson mountains at sunset.

The Bible … in the Beginning is not a great dramatic feat, nor is it likely to communicate profound religious feeling. Yet it is one of the better biblical films produced by commercial movie-makers. Some people will be enthralled by it. Others will be less than satisfied. If nothing else, the film should convince all that the revelation of God is better served by the verbal than the visual symbol.

Chronicle Of A Controversy

A Time for Burning, a fifty-eight-minute documentary drama produced for the interdenominational Lutheran Film Associates, New York, will make its debut on 105 National Educational Television network stations on October 17.

The film deals with a struggle that began last fall in Omaha when the Rev. William Youngdahl suggested that ten couples of his 1,100-member Augustana Lutheran Church visit ten neighboring Negro families. While this proposal was being debated in the church council, Sunday school teachers invited a group of Negro teen-agers to Sunday services. The presence of the Negroes raised anxiety, and the pastor’s proposal was shelved. Finally, the pastor resigned.

As this drama occurred, it was captured by a hand-held camera and wireless microphones. The film chronicles the build-up of tensions in public controversy and private conversations among church people and members of the community.

In November, the film will be made available for rental through Contemporary Films, of New York, San Francisco, and Evanston. Illinois.

Where Others Leave Off

For Pete’s Sake, a production of Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures, Minneapolis, will have its premiere showing this month at the World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin.

According to the producers, this film picks up where most Christian films leave off. Pete, the young adult protagonist, is converted early in the story, and then the camera focuses on the problems that can hit a man after he accepts Christ. The producers say they have attempted to replace the usual happily-ever-after theme with something more realistic, and to show that God has promised, not freedom from problems, but the presence of Himself.

In distributing For Pete’s Sake through commercial movie houses, World Wide Pictures is following a pattern it found successful with previous release of The Restless Ones. In The Restless Ones’ first eleven months (to August 15, 1966), two million persons viewed the film and after its showing, 120,000 recorded decisions for Christ and stayed for personal counseling.

Musical With A Message

Worlds Apart, a ninety-minute color film called by its producers “the first real Christian musical,” will be released on December 28 by Gospel Films, Inc.

The musical will premiere in theaters and civic auditoriums of thirty major cities before being released for rental to smaller groups.

The idea of writing a “musical with a Christian message in it, using a non-biblical story with the typical boy-meets-girl angle and colorful format,” came to top gospel-song writer John W. Peterson several years ago (see Dec. 20, 1963, issue, pp. 31, 32). Peterson has achieved this in Worlds Apart.

Professional talent from movies and television was used throughout the production. The script was written by Turnley Walker, a writer for the Bonanza TV series, and the cast is headed by Lynn Borden, known for her role as Mrs. Baxter in the Hazel series.

The plot and the characters of the film are the stereotypes one expects to find in a light, romantic Broadway musical, except for the working-in of a gospel message.

The hero, Dr. Paul Matthews, is a tall, dark, handsome, Purple Heart-holding physician who is infallibly Christian. Denise Henley, the heroine, is a beautiful, blonde entertainer whose heart is golden but troubled through neglect of God. They fall in love but are “worlds apart” because of different loyalties.

Their final reunion seems to cast God as something of a great Matchmaker in the sky. Perhaps that is the inevitable result of using the captivating and ageless boy-girl formula.