Page 4659 – Christianity Today (2024)

Thank you for Ruth Tucker’s article and related sidebars concerning the Worldwide Church of God [“From the Fringe to the Fold,” July 15]. Tears came to my eyes as I read what God has done. I grew up in a Sabbath-keeping, dietary-law-following, no-Christmas-or-Easter home after my dad fell under the spell of Armstrong’s radio preaching in the midfifties. I can still see stacks of The Plain Truth next to his reading chair and hear that voice coming over the airwaves. In spite of the faults and heresies of the WCG, I praise God for the respect my upbringing gave me for God’s Word, which eventually brought me to a knowledge of God’s saving grace. This is a classic example of our need to “always pray and not give up.” God is indeed a God of wonders! My only regret is that Dad didn’t live to see it happen.

Pastor David W. JohnsonCalvary Baptist ChurchRiverhead, NY

Ruth Tucker’s article did not capture fully the turmoil many WCG members have experienced because of the move towards orthodoxy. I have been a WCG member for 27 years-all of my adult life. I am profoundly grateful that we have finally begun to understand the gospel. But I am like a government official who was acquitted of some serious charges a few years ago. A news reporter asked him for his reaction to the acquittal; he said, “Can someone tell me where to go to get my reputation back?” I am happy we have abandoned cult practices and have found Christ, but can someone tell me where to go to get my life back?

David AndersonLos Alamos, NM

I grew up in Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, attended its “seminary,” and eventually became a pastor and writer for The Plain Truth. CT’s May/June issue made reference to the workshops I facilitated on spiritual healing.

Along with Ruth Tucker, I applaud the changes in doctrine toward orthodoxy (although the WCG still observes Jewish festivals of Unleavened Bread, Atonement, and Tabernacles, rejects eternal punishment, and teaches a hybrid postmortem evangelization). However, its leadership continues to operate according to the damaging, deceptive, and cultic practices of past administrations. This fact led to my resignation in May 1996 and an open letter asking for the authoritarian abuses and financial exploitations to be addressed.

Contrary to Tucker’s assertion that “a board of directors now leads the church,” in actuality, the pastor general retains near-dictatorial powers, as the by-laws will confirm. But these have not been available to the membership. As in the past, local congregations still send 100 percent of their funds to the Pasadena central body but receive few services in return. And, while wcg pastors are asked to cover three and four congregations in distant cities and take pay cuts, the pastor general recently was given a raise-a fact not disclosed to the membership.

My hope and prayer is that the WCG will indeed become a healthy part of the evangelical community. However, itwill take more than the doctrinal revision Tucker describes. Meanwhile, I am thankful to see growing numbers leaving the WCG, not for offshoot groups, but for membership in healthy Christian churches where they can find healing and be fed with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

David CovingtonNashville, TN

Two things in Tucker’s article were different in our experience: (1) The standard was not three tithes but basically two. We sent our first tithe to headquarters; we saved our second tithe for feasts (which were really our vacations). Once every seven years we paid a third tithe for the care of widows and orphans. (2) At least in the region we were in, no one would have been disfellowshiped for something as insignificant as having dinner with relatives for Christmas. That kind of infraction might have called for a stern, private talk from the preaching elder/pastor, but not disfellowshiping.

It’s interesting that Camilla Kleindienst, author of the sidebar article, is not bitter about having grown up believing things she is now finding are wrong. My experience with people who have left the WCG is that they become very bitter, against God, and against the WCG leadership.

Kathy RisherLouisville, KY

More dialogue, less rhetoricThere is a middle ground to this issue of the church and politics, and Richard Mouw has pointed it out [“Tolerance Without Compromise,” July 15]. Actually, neither John Woodbridge [ct, Mar. 6, 1995] nor Ed Dobson [“Taking Politics Out of the Sanctuary,” May 20] ever said Christians should abandon the public square, as their critics charge. What they and Mouw are addressing is the all-important attitude-of triumphalism and intolerance instead of humility and patience. This is the heart of the problem, which is being ignored by many of the respondents. This message needs to be drummed into the evangelical church until they finally get it. Our job is not to “teach [nonbelievers] to obey” through political force so we can have control, but to obey and set examples ourselves. We need more dialogue, less rhetoric.

Eric BoldenQueens, NY

Mouw has not clearly defined what we should be tolerant of and how. As Christians who name Christ as Lord, we should not be tolerant of credos and systems contrary to the revelations of Scripture on which we base our faith. We should, on the other hand, be tolerant of people who, as human beings and as sinners such as we all were and still are, have different beliefs. To “love the sinner and not the sin” has unfortunately for some become a discarded cliché instead of a fundamental insight basic to understanding these issues, though this precept comes straight from God himself (Rom. 5:8).

Robert C. VanstrumDellwood, MN

Censoring the Psalms

As a member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church, which still sings only the Psalms in worship, I was greatly interested in the article by Kathleen Norris on “Why the Psalms Scare Us” [July 15]. I appreciated her sharing her interaction with the vibrancy of the Psalms as she came face to face with the feelings and emotions of her own heart in the expressions of the psalmist. Building on her premises of the relevance of the Psalms for our daily experiences and the fact that the Psalms were meant to be sung, I press the question: Why have the great majority of churches today censored most of the Psalms out of Christian worship? Why do we sing entertaining or sentimental ditties in worship when we could be echoing the expressions of our deepest needs and capacities, which God has preserved for us in the hymnbook of the Scriptures? The Psalms are part of God’s inspired Word. Singing them in worship is a means of bringing glory to God and of developing spiritual awareness and growth in the worshiper.

Bruce C. Stewart, President EmeritusReformed Presbyterian Theological SeminaryPittsburgh, PA

The Psalms scare us because they clash with our distorted “sweet” Christianity and clash with our “sentimental sympathy,” which we mistakenly call “divine love.” They clash with our perverted need to have everyone like us, our selfish desire to put our “sweet image” first and the well-being of others second.

The Scriptures clearly teach that we cannot love “good” if we cannot hate “evil.” Jesus felt deep indignation against insensitivity, indifference, faithlessness, prayerlessness, disrespect for God, unteachability, legalism, hypocrisy, selfishness, self-elevation, materialism and pride. Can we have his mind and sensitivity and not feel the same?

Thomas L. ReidTucson, Ariz.

Codified charity is not welfare

I read with great interest Everett Wilson’s article “Saving the Safety Net” [July 15]. As the director of one of the largest social ministries in our state, the Wisconsin welfare initiative is of profound interest. We share Wilson’s concern for the thousands of our neighbors who will be dramatically affected by this legislation.

However, I take issue with Wilson’s presuppositions. I think both the Religious Right and the Religious Left expect far too much of our secular republic. It is time for the church manifested in local congregations and ministries to reassume a role we abrogated a generation ago.

On a practical level, Wilson’s use of the gleaning rights that ancient Israel’s poor enjoyed is not helpful to his argument. This was, in fact, codified local charity, not bureaucratic centralized welfare. Our present system of federalized entitlements has had a disastrous effect on millions in American cities. Local compassionate charities, on the other hand, have offered real help and direction to those caught in the web of dependency.

Chiding a secular government for a meager attempt at fiscal restraint is moot. Instead, we should seize the initiative to minister with compassion to our neighbors in need in the name, and for the glory, of Jesus Christ.

Patrick H. VanderburghMilwaukee Rescue MissionMilwaukee, WI

When we discuss the welfare “safety net,” why do we never discuss human nature? The fact is that some people need and deserve a handout, and others are undeserving and do not. Any system designed to separate these two classes must be designed and run by sinful human beings and is thus doomed to gross inefficiency at best and outright failure at worst.

A prominent economist once observed that, according to current statistics, our country could make an annual cash payment to every person below the official poverty line to bring that person out of poverty, and we would spend only 33 percent of the federal welfare budget! The problem is that those in the “undeserving” part of the underclass would squander the money, and they (and their children) would then be in the same state as before. Would our moral duty then be satisfied? If the bottom 5 percent of the “undeserving” underclass starved, would the other 95 percent be changing their ways? Harsh stuff perhaps, but it’s generally admitted that we’ve done severe harm over the past 20 years to that 95 percent.

Mike BareDenver, CO

Rendering God harmless

I found myself nodding wearily at the review of The New Century Hymnal, by Donald G. Bloesch [Books, July 15]. As a United Methodist, I have often sung the old-and perfectly suitable-lyrics to hymns I have heard from childhood. I am convinced Wesley and Watts would spin in their graves if they had any idea how the words of their hearts and rivers of praise to God the Father had been neutered and perverted to please every single group of people in the church. Something is wrong when people toss away the very essence of God in order to create him in their own image!

People are rendering God harmless and impotent-too far away to do anything and too preoccupied to care. Although I totally agree with Professor Bloesch, I don’t think he was emphatic enough.

Amy KitchensDecatur, AL

Bloesch seems to overlook the massive changes that take place in hymns in the passing years. The New Century Hymnal, contrary to its name, seems to look back and echo the ancient Christian witness. For instance: Saint Francis of Assisi referred to the sun as his brother and called for a sacred relationship to God’s creation, particularly in the singing of praise to God. Juliana of Norwich, a medieval nun, shared the idea of God “mothering” us (apparently with the blessing of the church). Early church Fathers frequently referred to Jesus as “Child of God.” Like any book, The New Century Hymnal is not for all people. If it is simply an effort to be politically correct, as Bloesch maintains, it is to be pitied. But equally pitiful is the response that fearfully rejects change because “we never did it that way before.”

James ElliottMount Vernon, Ohio

Presbyterians and scriptural authority

Reviewer Robert Patterson [Books, July 15] cites Edmund Clowney’s book The Church as warning “of the precarious situation in denominations like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which since 1967 has not required officers to affirm the authority of Scripture or subscribe to any church creed.” I greatly respect Clowney, but I think he is mistaken.In the 1995-96 edition of the PCUSA Book of Order, all Ministers of the Word and Sacrament, Elders and Deacons are expected to answer in the affirmative the following questions at the time of their ordination and/or installation:

G-14.0207-b. “Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and God’s Word to you?”

G-14.0207-c. “Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed by those confessions as you lead the people of God?”

There are 11 historical creeds and confessions in the PCUSA Constitution, including the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, the Westminster Confession of Faith, and the recent Brief Statement of Faith. In theory, at least, the Book of Order does require us to hold our officers to these standards.

Rev. M. Blair Cash IIINatchez, MS

The ministry of reconciliation

In certain aspects, the editorial of Robert A. Seiple [“Ministry in the Real World Order,” July 15] could be misleading. Truly Christians have been given the ministry and message of reconciliation. This consists in bringing the lost to faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, which reconciles them to God. The ministry of reconciliation is not bringing people of different ethnic or religious backgrounds to peaceful relationships with one another. It may be admirable to bring such reconciliation to groups in Bosnia, Somalia, and elsewhere, but this is hardly the concept of reconciliation in Scripture. To be engaged in conciliatory efforts in such places is commendable; but let’s not confuse that with the ministry of reconciliation of 2 Corinthians 5:18-21.

Ralph H. IsenseeVancouver, WA

Stand for and with the persecuted

Kim Lawton has done an excellent job of capturing two elements vital to the fight to overcome and eliminate persecution [“The Suffering Church,” July 15]. First, we must take a stand for our persecuted brothers and sisters. Public pressure, letter-writing campaigns, and so on are vital and often (not always) effective. Second, we must stand with our brothers and sisters. Meeting their needs, praying for them and with them, going to them, and encouraging them are vital and give them support and courage to stand in their own societies.

In order to stand both for and with, we must also understand that while systems and ideologies are anti-Christian and the enemy, the people who live under those systems or believe the ideologies are people for whom Christ died. Standing-for will attack and put pressure on the systems and ideologies. Standing-with will provide the church with the support, courage, and resources to reach those outside of Christ.

Peter Torry, PresidentOpen Doors with Brother AndrewSanta Ana, Calif.

I was surprised that neither the article nor your listing of organizations working in the field mentioned the Rutherford Institute. In addition to handling about 85 percent of all cases of religious discrimination in the U.S., the Rutherford Institute has a substantial presence internationally and has assisted innumerable individuals and churches throughout the world. In the last few months, the institute has provided legal representation (including his appeal) to Robert Hussein in Kuwait. We recently published a comprehensive Handbook on Religious Liberty Around the World, with case studies of over 40 countries. Moreover, the institute has presented a defense of religious liberty at all recent United Nations conferences and visited representative countries in all regions of the world.

Pedro C. Moreno, Esq.The Rutherford InstituteCharlottesville, Va.(804) 978-3888; fax (804) 978-1789;e-mail: rutherford@fni.com;home page: www.rutherford.org

Exorcising ghosts

When David Neff discussed “hired pens” in his “Inside CT” column [June 17], he observed that “Christian celebrities should have a higher standard.” He reported that Charles Colson asked that his ct columns include the byline of Nancy Pearcey, who apparently writes many of these columns.

Neff correctly points out that “Colson has set a good example by giving credit in his books to staff whose contributions are substantial.” But Neff’s observation that “It is trickier to acknowledge teamwork in magazine columns and radio programs” doesn’t stand the test of a comparison with those in the secular media who properly acknowledge their contributors. Bylined columns in science magazines routinely give guest columnists a byline. To do otherwise would subject the columnist to charges of misrepresentation or worse.

Though ghostwritten books credited to Christian celebrities may be due to “Publishers eager to sell books,” the failure to acknowledge assistance or, worse, placing one’s name on the work of another, is ultimately the responsibility of the person listed as the author. No Christian writer or publisher should misrepresent authorship. And no Christian author should acquiesce to a publisher’s demand to do so.

Christianity Today can set the standard for Christian writers, publishers, and broadcasters by establishing a “No Ghostwriting” policy. If a columnist doesn’t write the columns that appear over his or her name, then at the very least the columnist should begin each column with a few sentences introducing that issue’s topic and writer. Making exceptions for a few “celebrity Christians” is unfair to the many prominent Christians who actually write what appears under their names and to those of us who read what they write.

Forrest M. Mims IIISeguin, Tex.

Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address.Send to Eutychus, Christianity Today, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When the first issue of Christianity Today appeared 40 years ago, none of us could have imagined what the future held. Small in number and insignificant in influence, evangelicals then were an ignored minority in most ecclesiastical circles. Those who claimed to take the Bible seriously were often labeled hopelessly obscurantist or unloving and insensitive to a world in need.

And yet God was at work, sometimes in surprising ways. After the Second World War, new evangelical organizations and a new generation of leaders began to emerge. Spiritual hunger became evident among large numbers of people.

Repeatedly in those days I came across men and women in virtually every denomination who were committed to the historic biblical faith, believing it was not only spiritually vital, but socially relevant and intellectually defensible. And yet they had no standard around which they could rally, and no place they could look for spiritual encouragement and intellectual challenge. Christianity Today came into being to help fill that vacuum.

As Christianity Today enters its forty-first year, our first response should be one of great gratitude for all God has done. Who could have envisioned the almost explosive growth of evangelicals during the last four decades? Who could have foreseen the impact this magazine would have, not only in evangelical circles but far beyond? God alone must get the credit.

But what of the future? Where will evangelicalism be in another 40 years-or even four years from now, when we stand on the brink of a new century?

Only God knows the future, and thankfully, God is the God of the future. Try as we might, our speculations about the future will be only that-speculations. If we went back a hundred years we would be amazed how far off target many predictions were concerning the twentieth century. History is full of surprises, and the next century will be no exception. Many leaders openly question whether or not there will be another full century.

Population growth will bring new pressures and new ethical problems. Technological advances will probably be staggering, providing new opportunities for the furtherance of the gospel, and new dangers as well. Progress always has its dark side, for the human heart has not changed.

But technology alone will not determine the future of evangelicalism, nor will any other outside influence-social, political, economic, or intellectual. Yes, these will all affect us, but whether or not evangelicals once again become an insignificant minority will depend on one thing: whether we allow God to shape our hearts and minds and to guide us as we respond to a changing world. Let me mention six factors that I believe will determine the future impact of evangelicals.

First, the evangelical future will depend on our vision. The twin enemies of vision are always complacency and discouragement. Complacency makes us lazy; discouragement paralyzes us. Few things cripple us like pride and self-satisfaction in the face of success, or despair in the face of evil. We evangelicals are no longer an ignored minority, but success should drive us to our knees, for its dangers are enormous.

How can we be complacent when over two-thirds of the world’s population is not Christian, even in a nominal sense? Or how can we be discouraged when God is still at work, and has promised to be with us to the end of the age?

I often think of the words of James at the Jerusalem Council, that God was at work among the nations “to take out of them a people for his name” (Acts 15:14). This is still happening all over the world. Often these new believers are a very small minority, and yet they are still a part of God’s great plan.

Second, it will depend on our trust. There is much to lament today, and at times Satan seems to be thrashing about in one final desperate attempt to capture this world. We must not be ignorant of his devices.

But will we fight the spiritual battles of the future in the energy of the flesh? Or will we yield ourselves to the power of the Holy Spirit, using the spiritual weapons God has provided to combat the forces of evil arrayed against us?

During our recent evangelistic crusade in Minneapolis we witnessed one of the largest responses to the gospel message we have ever seen. I am convinced the main reason was prayer, as believers from almost every denomination (including Roman Catholics) sought the face of God in intercession for their area. These Christians sensed their own powerlessness, knowing that only God can break through the hardness of the human heart and turn back the forces of deception and darkness.

Third, it will depend on our obedience. Few things discredit the gospel in the eyes of the world more quickly than moral and ethical failure by those claiming to follow Christ. And yet we are in grave danger of being captured by the spirit of our age. Satan apparently does not need to invent any new temptations; the allures of money, pleasure, and power seem quite sufficient to blunt our witness and neutralize our impact. In an ego-driven world given over to selfish indulgence and pride, Christians must be models of integrity and morality, both in their personal lives and in the work of their institutions and organizations.

Fourth, it will depend on our love and compassion. Just as moral compromise blunts our message, so does an unloving or indifferent spirit. Divine love sent Christ into the world, and that same love must compel us to reach out to a hurting and torn world. If we are filled with God’s love, we will seek to overcome the racial and economic barriers that divide us and condemn untold millions to hopelessness and poverty. We will reach out with the gospel to those who are lost, for there is no greater way we can express love than to tell others about the Savior’s love.

We also must learn in a deeper way what it means to love within the body of Christ, even when there is not full agreement. Satan surely must rejoice when there is bickering and strife among fellow believers. Overcoming disunity may well be one of our greatest challenges in the years ahead.

Fifth, it will depend on our faithfulness to the Word of God. One of the hallmarks of evangelicals has always been our commitment to the Bible as the unique and authoritative Word of God. Will we lose confidence in its trustworthiness, intentionally or unintentionally looking elsewhere for spiritual foundations?

There probably has never been a time in church history when the gospel was not under attack from some quarter. Those attacks have usually been most devastating, however, when they came from within. Will that be true among evangelicals in the future? Certain theological truths are not negotiable, and more than ever we must seek to be faithful to the Word of God, allowing it to shape our thinking and mold our behavior.

Finally, the future impact of evangelicals will depend on our steadfastness. Most of us know very little of Paul’s experience: “When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world” (1 Cor. 4:12-13, niv).

The time may come when society will turn against us; can those of us who follow the One who was despised and rejected expect anything less for ourselves? Or, in God’s providence, the opposite may be the case; the massive tides of secularism sweeping our land might be reversed.

Either way, it does not matter. We are called to be steadfast for Christ and his truth, regardless of the situation. Our calling is not to be successful (as the world measures success); our calling is to be faithful.

Paul exhorted the Corinthian Christians not to give in to the pressures of their pagan culture, but to hold fast to the risen Christ. His words apply just as pointedly to us today: “Stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58, niv).

May we each recommit our lives to Christ and his will as we face the future.

By Billy Graham, evangelist and the founder of this magazine.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Americans rarely mark their fortieth birthdays with enthusiasm. The idea of singing “Happy Birthday” to ourselves sounded pretty unexciting-and a little hollow. None of us now on staff was here in the beginning, and today’s CT reads and looks much different than it did in the early years. And the magazine’s longevity, in itself, does not necessarily mean honor and glory for God’s kingdom. Some could argue that our longevity means, simply, that we were shrewd enough to live and prosper by market forces.

Still, CT turning 40 does feel like a significant milestone-a sign that something has succeeded. And we decided that that something was evangelicalism itself.

What needed to be celebrated, we felt, was what God has achieved through a handful of people who wanted to honor him. Evangelicalism is the story of a remnant who swam against the currents of the age, who knew that the old stories were more than simply wise, heroic, or helpful-they were also true and indispensable. They clung to their knowledge that God is just as active now as he has been throughout history, that to be named “Christian” means one has a relationship with a living person, God himself. In an age of scientific empiricism, rationalism, social engineering, and the pursuit of human “progress,” these were brave stands.

In just one issue of this magazine, even an expanded one, we could not begin to tell the whole story of modern evangelicalism. What we present here is a sampling of the “Movers and Shapers” who have inspired and led this movement:

1. Carl Henry and Kenneth Kantzer. Our interview with these former CT editors comes closest to telling this magazine’s story.
2. The Ecuador martyrs. The deaths of these five young evangelicals occurred ten months before CT’s first issue, and their story informed two of the most memorable articles of the first year (both by the newly widowed Elisabeth Howard Elliot) and established the seriousness of purpose evangelicals had in taking literally Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations.
3. Tom Skinner. The story of this exciting evangelist emphasizes a fact that evangelicals have always believed, though not always lived: that God’s kingdom is not white, suburban, or middle class.
4. Henrietta Mears. The work of this foremother, whose Sunday-school ministry preceded the burgeoning of post-war parachurch evangelicalism, set in motion individuals and impulses that have significantly shaped the movement.
5. J. I. Packer and John Stott. Finally, we acknowledge our debt to England’s evangelicals. Just as the religion of our colonial ancestors would have been deadly formal without Wesley and Whitefield, so modern American evangelicalism would have been thin and shallow without this pastoral theologian and this theological pastor.

Many names and events go unmentioned or are underappreciated. (The most obvious is our founder, Billy Graham, who more than any other individual personifies modern evangelicalism. See our special tribute in the November 13, 1995, issue and Graham’s editorial in this one, p. 14.) But we feel this sampling well represents the character of the movement we love.

Although these pages look backward, they contain a powerful message about the future. God will honor and bless our work only to the degree we match our forebears’ commitment to honor and follow Christ. In our November 11 issue we will recognize 50 younger leaders, age 40 and under, to show that God is still very active in this work. But here we celebrate what God has done through us and these pioneers. For which and to Him we say thank you.

The Editors

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The year of Christianity Today's birth also brought the death of five American missionaries in Ecuador: Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Roger Youderian, Ed McCully, and Peter Fleming. The story of what happened on that January day in 1956-first told in newsweeklies and Life magazine and then in numerous books and documentaries-became a primary narrative for the young evangelical movement, reinforcing and illustrating to the world our core ideals. Their noble sacrifice and the heroic follow-up work of family members like Rachel Saint, the sister of Nate, and Jim Elliot's widow, Elisabeth, inspired a generation of Christians-some to go to the mission field and many more to live a more mature and sacrificial Christian life.

While the story is familiar, many of the details have been unknown. Why were the missionaries attacked, especially after such promising initial contacts with their eventual killers, the Huaorani? Why didn't the missionaries use their guns to defend themselves?

Steve Saint grew up with these questions about the final moments of his father's life. Despite spending school vacations among and working with the now-Christian Huaorani, Steve only recently has gotten his answers-which have served to make the story even more amazing and inspiring still.

This article, like our August cover story, appears as a chapter in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, a collection of essays edited by Susan Bergman (Harper San Francisco).

As I made my final approach to the short jungle airstrip, I could tell I was coming in a little high. I pushed the flap lever all the way down, but it still wasn't going to be enough to get me down on the tiny mud-and-grass strip. I decided to pick up speed, staying on the approach glide path to get the feel for my next try. I had just spent three weeks building a new airstrip with the Huaorani people in Ecuador, but this was my first landing in Huaorani/Auca territory, and this little strip wasn't exactly what the engineers had in mind when they designed this Cessna 172.

Racing down the field just ten feet in the air, I could clearly see the faces of the Huaorani people lining the strip. As I pulled up and banked to the left to start another approach, I could see the river and what is left of the sandbar where my father, Nate Saint, had made his first approach, the very first approach ever in Huaorani territory, just 40 years ago. He and fellow missionaries Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, and Roger Youderian had set up camp on that little sandbar in hopes of making contact with the primitive Aucas, known for their fierce infighting and hatred of outsiders. The five missionaries had a deep burden to share the gospel message with a people known only for hunting and killing. Their initial friendly contact ended in death by spearing.

On my second try, I was right on the numbers. Crossing the final bushes, I cut the power and the wheels touched down solid, just ten feet from the mark I had chosen. I hopped out to say hello, but I was in a hurry to take off again before the afternoon thunderheads started to drop their torrential rains and trap my little plane in mud, making a takeoff impossible. Dad, I remembered, had flown the Piper Family Cruiser off the beach each afternoon for much the same reason while awaiting the first contact with the "savages," as the Quechua word Auca means.

So much was the same, and yet circ*mstances were so different! The past three weeks I had been carving a new airstrip out of the virgin jungle with "the people" (which is what their own Huaorani word means), some of whom had murdered my father and his friends just before my fifth birthday.

Mincaye was one of them. Mincaye, with whom I had just gone hunting, who laughed and joked about everything, who had tried the hula hoop on his first friendly contact with the outside. He had been on the beach that fateful day in 1956. There was no laughing on that visit.

Dyuwi, shy, sweet Dyuwi, who hung around our camp each night waiting for a break in the conversation so he could thank Wangongi (creator God) for keeping us safe from falling trees, Konga ants, and poisonous snakes: he too had been there. Just a teenager then, and certainly just as shy, he was nevertheless an up-and-coming killer who knew what they had come to do and went about it-no doubt with the same vigor I had seen him demonstrate on a huge stump he'd been working for the last three days to clear from our landing strip.

Kimo, who brought his canoe full of provisions so we would have plenty to eat while we worked on the strip, had also been there in 1956. He told me that the last of the five young cowodi (foreigners/strangers) had fled across the river, away from the attack, and instead of fleeing into the jungle and safety, had climbed onto a log and called in poor Huao, "We just came to meet you. We aren't going to hurt you. Why are you killing us?" It was this same gentle Kimo who listened to this plea and then ran a nine-foot hardwood spear through the foreigner's chest.

Why did these gentle, kindhearted men I had been eating, sleeping, and working alongside kill my father and his friends? Why did the missionaries not defend themselves with guns against primitive spears? Why leave five young women widowed, nine children fatherless? What had caused the Huaorani to kill the very men who had called to them from the plane that they were friends, who had exchanged gifts with them on a line dropped from the circling plane?

Historically, every encounter with the Huaorani had ended in death, from the sixteenth-century conquistadors to seventeenth-century Jesuits to nineteenth-century gold and rubber hunters. Toward the end of 1955, the oil companies were closing in on Huaorani territory, an area of about 2,500 square miles. This tribe of unknown size and location was seen to be an irritant to development. Not only had they killed oil company employees who ventured into their territory, but they had even lain in ambush outside the big oil camps and killed unsuspecting employees right outside their own quarters. Little was said about the raids made by gun-wielding oil company men against the people, but every Huaorani killing was told and retold in the oil camps until "Auca" savagery and killing prowess gained almost mystical power to strike fear into the hearts of even seasoned jungle workers. Soldiers had been dispatched to protect oil camps, and there was talk of a military attempt at wiping out this "nuisance."

Confrontation was inevitable, and the question was not would the Huaoranis be contacted, but who would contact them and with what intentions. Would the contact group take medicines and go in peace to live among the people, or would they go with poisoned meat and booby traps and guns to see the nuisance was eliminated or driven deep into the jungle where it would no longer impede the progress of civilization?

Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, and Ed McCully, three college friends working as missionaries in Ecuador, had a burning desire to follow Jesus' command to take the gospel message into all the world. They had prayed for years for this primitive group that had never heard the redemption story of peace with God through the death of Christ. Now the men began to feel they should act soon or perhaps lose the opportunity for peaceful contact.

The first challenge was somehow to establish that they were friendly and intended no harm-no easy task when you can't speak a common language or safely get close enough to try communicating in any other way. They didn't even know for sure where in the jungles the semi-nomadic Huaorani could be found. My father had generally avoided flying over their territory as he delivered goods to various missionaries in the dense jungle, but as the dry season approached (the time most likely to expose a sandbar big enough to land Dad's small plane), he and Ed flew over the area and spotted one small Huaorani clearing.

The three men rounded out their team with two more: Pete Fleming, a friend of Jim and Ed's, working in Ecuador with the same mission group, and Roger Youderian, who had been working with the Jivaros, known as the "head shrinkers" of the Ecuadorian jungles. A veteran of the World War II paratroopers, Roger possessed a jungle savvy and an ability to live and travel like the Indians.

These five men were not cast from the same mold. Jim was impetuous but focused. Both a college wrestler and a writer, his good looks and physical strength were matched by a deep introspection. Ed McCully, president of his college class, had played football end and won his senior oratory contest. Everyone expected him to go to law school, but something stronger called him to the jungles of the Amazon. Dad was born into an artist's family but picked up a stray gene. He loved the technical and mechanical aspects of life and wanted to use his interest and skills for a purpose with dimensions that would honor God and outlast the temporal. Flying support for missionaries was a way to fulfill both of his desires. Pete was the youngest of the group, but in some ways the group's sage. Roger was the guy you sent to do the job when it took dogged determination and a completely willing heart to get it done.

Here were five common young men whose unifying distinction was less their inherited abilities or acquired skills than their commitment to seek God's will and to carry out his purposes for their lives. They were aware of the risk they were taking but felt it was justified, though they could have had no idea of the impact their martyrdom would someday have.

The men studied oil company reports and talked to everyone they could who might give them additional insight into the Huao culture. They began to develop a plan, knowing there was no way to eliminate all danger, but also realizing they each had a family and other responsibilities that dictated caution as well as speed. My father and Ed flew back and forth over the jungle and discovered a tiny clearing. They gleaned a short repertoire of Huao phrases from Dayuma, a Huao girl who had fled almost certain death from intratribal spearings and was living on a hacienda outside Huao territory. My father's sister, Rachel, was living with Dayuma and studying the Huao language, sure that God had called her to live with this tribe someday and teach them how to walk on God's trail.

The missionaries began making regular overflights to drop friendship gifts from the plane, calling over a loudspeaker, "We like you. We are your friends." Soon they decided to try the bucket drop, a technique Dad had developed to deliver and retrieve items from missionaries who had no airstrip. He circled his plane overhead in tight circles while a long cord with the goods attached was reeled out behind the plane. Air friction on the basket at the end of the line would make the cord cut to the inside of the circle flown by the airplane, while the weight of the basket caused the cord to fall. When enough line was extended behind the plane, the end of the line would actually hang motionless in the air. Letting out more line at that point would make the line drop straight down where it could be made to hover just above the ground.

The Huaorani tell me that when this technique was used, they understood that the gifts were being deliberately offered and signaled their understanding and desire to continue the exchange by tying on gifts of their own. They remember receiving machetes, a metal axe (a prized possession among people who traditionally used stone axes), brightly colored ribbons, and aluminum cooking pots. In exchange, they returned a Huao comb, a feather headdress, smoked monkey, and even a live parrot, which became my childhood pet.

After making 13 weekly gift drops, Dad located a small sandbar on the Curaray River. By flying over the sandbar and dropping small paper bags of flour at timed intervals, then repeating the process on his own airstrip at Shell Mera, he measured the sandbar to be 650 feet long. It was only about six miles from the Huaorani settlement, although by trail, it would be many, many miles of arduous trekking up and down ridges and across water. (A Huaorani moving at a fast pace could get there in three to five hours.) On January 2, 1956, Dad flew the four other men in one by one, and they set up camp on what they called "Palm Beach." They made repeated flights back and forth to the Huaorani settlement so that the people would figure out that the plane was no longer flying off into the distance but landing in their territory.

After three days of waiting on the beach, the men suddenly saw two naked women step out of the jungle onto the opposite bank. Two missionaries waded out into the river to greet them. When it was apparent the women were being well received, a man joined them on the beach. Dad's journal records that the three Huaorani seemed relaxed and acted in a friendly manner. They shared the missionaries' hamburgers and Koolaid and carried on an animated conversation as if their every word were understood. The man, whom the missionaries nicknamed "George," made it obvious that he understood the men had arrived in the ibo (Huao for woodbee or airplane) and he wanted a ride. Dad took him for a quick spin, which wasn't enough, and then for a second ride over his settlement, where his people saw him in the plane. Dad recorded that George got so excited that he tried to crawl out the open doorway onto the strut, apparently having no concept of how high they were or how fast they were traveling.

Late in the afternoon, Dad and Pete flew out to a friendly jungle station as usual, to avoid getting trapped by a downpour on the frequently flooding river. Shortly afterward, the younger of the two women went into the jungle as abruptly as she had appeared. Soon "George" inconspicuously followed. The older woman stayed on the beach well into the night. (When the missionaries came down from their tree house in the morning, the coals by her fire were still hot).

The next day there were no visitors, but in an overflight on January 8, Dad spotted a party of ten Huaorani on their way to the beach. (The jungle growth is too thick to be able to see the trail, so this chance spotting probably occurred as the group crossed the Tiwaeno River.) At noon, Dad radioed to my mother. "Looks like they'll be here for the Sunday afternoon service. This is it! Pray for us. Will contact you again at 4:30, over and out." As soon as 4:30 came without word from the always punctual Nate, Mom knew something was wrong and contacted the other missionary pilot. He flew over the beach the next morning, spotting the plane stripped of its canvas covering and one body in the river. Four days later a weary but tense ground party made up of missionaries, Quechua Indians, and military personnel found the other bodies, identifiable only by their watches, rings, and other personal effects.

Photos developed from film found in Dad's camera at the bottom of the river, a diary fished out of his pocket, and his watch, stopped at 3:10, seemed to be all there was to tell about the end of his life.

Many times over the years I have wondered what the end was like. When did they realize they were being attacked? Why didn't they attempt to defend themselves? What went through their minds in those last minutes before losing consciousness? They knew that they were dying on a temporary sandbar in an obscure river in unknown territory. Each surely thought about the wife he was leaving behind, who loved him and would miss him like life itself. They must have pictured the nine children among them, one still unborn, who would wonder what happened to Daddy. I imagine they felt they had failed in their objective of taking the gospel to a needy and murderous tribe, as they lay dying, bodies pierced by the wooden spears of Gikita and Nampa and Kimo and Nimonga and Mincaye and Dyuwi.

After the murders, my Aunt Rachel continued learning the Huao language, taking the apostle Paul's words as a personal promise. "Those who were not told will see, and those who have not heard will understand." Dayuma also believed the words Rachel taught her from the Bible and decided to return to her people, to teach them what she had learned about God and the outside world of the cowodi. Less than three years after the massacre, Aunt Rachel and Jim Elliot's widow, Elisabeth, had made contact and were living among the tribe. There they practiced basic medicine and began to notate an oral language in hopes of someday translating the Scriptures into Huao-tidido (the Huao language).

I grew up in Quito, Ecuador, and enjoyed spending school vacations whenever I could with my Aunt Rachel among the Huaorani. Being fatherless did not make me unique there: most others had lost family in intratribal killings. Though I knew which men had killed Dad, it was not something I asked about. According to Huaorani tradition, as my father's oldest son I would be primarily responsible for avenging his death in kind, so I never wanted to appear too interested in the particulars. Even Aunt Rachel, who died last year after 37 years with the Huaorani, knew very little of the details.

But finally, last year, during my most recent journey to build a new airstrip and clinic with the Huaorani, I asked the evangelist Dyuwi how many times he had killed before he began to walk on God's trail as a young man. We were sitting outside Dayuma's house in the village of Tonampade, named after one of my childhood friends, Tona. He became the first Huao martyr, speared while trying to reach his downriver relatives with the gospel. I sat in the shade with Dyuwi and others, some of us swinging in hammocks and some squatting by an open groundfire. Children played nearby with clipped-winged birds. In a rush of stories, Dyuwi, Kimo, Dawa, Gikita, and Mincaye, all participants that day on the beach, paid me a high compliment by speaking openly of the killing. They knew that all of us have experienced God's forgiveness and that they had nothing to fear from me.

As they described their recollections, it occurred to me how incredibly unlikely it was that the Palm Beach killing took place at all; it is an anomaly that I cannot explain outside of divine intervention.

Though I was familiar with the story as we knew it from the photographs and diaries, I began to hear of a very different drama being played out within the Huao clearing. Nankiwi (the man called "George" by the missionaries) wanted to take another wife. For several reasons, the young girl's mother and brother disapproved. This made Nankiwi furious, and he began to threaten to kill the brother. Their disapproval also frustrated the young girl and she, in typical Huao fashion, made a dramatic case out of her thwarted plans, threatening, "If you won't let me marry, then why should I go on living? I'll just go to the foreigners in the ibo and let them kill me." Certainly it was no coincidence that of all the small groups of Huaorani scattered throughout their large territory, this group was the one from which Dayuma had fled, and this very girl was her sister. Being of the same stubborn stock as Dayuma, who had escaped to the fearsome "outside," she set off for Palm Beach. Nankiwi apparently saw this as an opportunity to be alone with her and took off after her. One older woman, seeing what was going on and knowing that discovery of their tryst would probably lead to killings within the group, decided to go along as chaperone.

When my father took Nankiwi for a ride, and the rest of the tribe saw him in the plane, they decided to go visit the cowodi, too. The next morning, they took the trail for Palm Beach. But before reaching the beach, they ran into Nankiwi and the girl, who were unchaperoned. Her brother, Nampa, flew into a rage and was ready to kill Nankiwi. Apparently to divert attention from his own indiscretion, Nankiwi told the group that the cowodi had attacked them and they were fleeing. Scoffing as she told me this, Dawa implied that most of the Huaorani found this hard to believe, since Nankiwi had a reputation as a troublemaker. Someone asked about the older woman; "she had to flee another way," Nankiwi lied.

As tempers flared, the oldest man, Gikita, took over. He had lived longer than any of the rest and knew better than any how savage and deceptive the outsiders were. While the group made their way back to the village, Gikita began to recount all the killings that had been committed by outsiders.

While they were sharpening spears and working up their fury, the older woman returned from the beach. When she saw the men making spears and readying themselves for an attack, she knew Nankiwi had lied to them, and she tried to convince them that no one had been attacked. She told them the cowodi were completely friendly and meant no harm. Listening to her description of events on the beach, Gikita did not understand all that was going on, but he knew enough about the cowodi to know that they had never been friendly before, and he was determined that they should be killed.

What I find hard to explain is that killing the cowodi only made sense if they had indeed attacked the three Huaorani, since they were otherwise a wonderful resource for the greatly prized and much-needed knives, machetes, axes, and cooking pots. Yet, if they had attacked, according to Gikita's logic, they would certainly attack again, and they obviously had the superior technology of guns and an airplane. The Huaorani killed for various reasons: revenge, anger, frustration, fear. Sometimes it took very little provocation. But they always wanted two things: superiority of force and surprise. In contemplating an attack on Palm Beach, they knew they would not have a superior force. Six men with spears was hardly a match for five likely armed cowodi. If they killed the cowodi they knew they would have to burn their houses, leave their gardens, and flee as they always did after attacks, because they knew that other cowodi would come in their ibos and find them. Add to this the fact that five of the six attackers were just teenagers, not seasoned killers, and that one witness to the Friday contact insisted the cowodi were friendly. Under these circ*mstances, it seems hard to believe there ever was an attack; yet there was.

On Sunday afternoon, when the killers finally arrived at Palm Beach, they could see that there were five cowodi, and that they had guns. We know that the guns, which were primarily intended for protection from animals, were usually kept out of sight. The missionaries had vowed to one another before God that they would not defend themselves against human attack, even in the face of death.

Dyuwi tells me that some of the young attackers, seeing they did not easily outnumber the foreigners, got scared and asked Gikita how they could attack. Gikita said that he would first spear each of the five and then the younger men could finish the job. He sent three women over to the far side of the river to distract and separate the missionaries. This seems to have worked as planned. When two of the women showed themselves, two of the men (Jim and Pete, I imagine, since they knew the language best) waded into the river to greet them. Gikita started to rush the three left on the beach but slipped on a wet log under the leaves of the jungle floor and fell. All his spears hit the ground, making a loud noise. The men on the beach turned to see what the noise was, and the element of surprise, the second critical factor, was now also lost.

This was too much for the young attackers, and they started to flee. Gikita called them back, saying, "We came to kill them. Now let's finish it or die here ourselves." This seems at least half-heartedly to have rallied the troops. Nampa ran across the beach toward the two men in the river, spearing the larger man in the river through the torso. Kimo showed me how the cowodi began to claw at his side "like a gata monkey that has been shot with a dart." (This was probably the man trying to get his pistol out of his holster, which had a snap-down cover.) As the foreigner began shooting into the air, one of the two women in the shallow river, Nampa's mother, grabbed the foreigner's arms from behind so Nampa could spear him again. Kimo said that when the women pulled on the cowodi's arms, Nampa was grazed by a gunshot and fell down hard. According to Dawa, Nampa recovered from this wound before dying a year or so later while hunting.

Gikita says he recognized my father from the many overflights and speared him first. A second foreigner ran to help him, and Gikita speared him, too (this was most likely Ed). Mincaye said the third man on the beach ran to the airplane, partially climbed inside, and picked up something like he was going to eat it. Mincaye asked why he would do this, and as he mimicked his action, I could see he must have been picking up the microphone to report the attack. Nimonga speared him from the back, and he fell out of the plane onto the ground. When they showed me how he speared him, I knew the man must have been Roger, because that is the angle of the spear that is protruding from Roger's body as it is being towed behind the canoe in the rescue party pictures.

During the attack, the "smaller" of the two cowodi who had been crossing to greet the women rushed to a log on the far side of the river and began calling to the attackers in phrases that Kimo and Gikita say they understood to be "We just came to meet you. We aren't going to hurt you. Why are you killing us?" (This was probably Pete, who, though he was tall, was the thinner of the two men in the river when the spearing started. He also knew the language the best.)

"Why didn't he flee into the jungle?" Mincaye emphatically asked me. "If he would have fled, surely he would have lived." Instead, he just waited for Kimo to wade out and spear him.

Dawa, one of the three women, told me she had hidden in the bush through the attack, hearing but not seeing the killing of the five men. She told me she had been hit by gun pellets in the wrist and just above the knee. (These obviously came from random warning shots fired to scare the attackers, because Dawa was hiding on the far side of the narrow river and the men couldn't have known of her presence.) She also told me that after the killing she saw cowodi above the trees, singing. She didn't know what this kind of music was until she later heard records of Aunt Rachel's and became familiar with the sound of a choir.

Mincaye and Kimo confirmed that they heard the singing and saw what Dawa seems to describe as angels along the ridge above Palm Beach. Dyuwi verified hearing the strange music, though he describes what he saw more like lights, moving around and shining, a sky full of jungle beetles similar to fireflies with a light that is brighter and doesn't blink.

Apparently all the participants saw this bright multitude in the sky and felt they should be scared, because they knew it was something supernatural. Their only familiarity with the spiritual world was one of fear. (Dawa has said that this supernatural experience was what drew her to God when she later heard of him from Dayuma.)

After the killing, the Huaorani showed their customary disdain for their victims by throwing the men's bodies and their belongings in the river and stripping the plane of much of its fabric covering. When they reached their settlement, they burned their houses and fled into the jungle, fearing the retribution from the outside they were sure would come.

As they repeatedly discussed the raid, one inexplicable question haunted the Huaorani: why hadn't the cowodi used their guns to defend themselves? If Nampa and Dawa had not been wounded, the answer would have been quite simple: either the men didn't really have guns, or the guns didn't work. After the adrenalin rush of any frightening event, it is easy to question what we think we saw or heard. But the Huaorani were certain that the superficial wounds were unintended, since Nampa was hit only after his mother grabbed the cowodi's arms and Dawa knew no one saw where she was hiding.

These wounds, actual evidence that the mission-aries were capable of defending themselves and chose not to, were a major factor in the Huaorani men agreeing to allow Aunt Rachel and

Elisabeth Elliot to come live with them. They had to know the answer: why would the cowodi let themselves be killed rather than kill, as any normal Huaorani would have done? This question dogged Gikita until he heard the full story of why the men wanted to make contact and about another man, Jesus, who freely allowed his own death to benefit all people.

Forty years ago, Gikita was an unusually old man in a tribe that killed friends and relatives with the same zeal and greater frequency than they did their enemies. Now he is nearing 80 years of age and has seen his grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up without the constant fear of spearings. He has repeatedly asserted that all he wants to do is go to heaven and live peacefully with the five men who came to tell him about Wangongi, creator God.

My father and his four friends were not given the privilege of watching their children and grandchildren grow up. I've often wished I could have known my dad as an adult, for Mom and Aunt Rachel have often said our thought process and mannerisms are much alike. I have trouble distinguishing what I actually "remember" of him and what I have been told. But I do know that he left me a legacy, and the challenge now is for me to pass it on to my children. Dad strove to find out what life really is. He found identity, purpose, and fulfillment in being obedient to God's call. He tried it, tested it, and committed himself to it. I know that the risk he took, which resulted in his death and consequently his separation from his family, he took not to satisfy his own need for adventure or fame, but in obedience to what he believed was God's directive to him. I suppose he is best known because he died for his faith, but the legacy he left his children was his willingness first to live for his faith.

God took five common young men of uncommon commitment and used them for his own glory. They never had the privilege they so enthusiastically pursued to tell the Huaorani of the God they loved and served. But for every Huaorani who today follows God's trail through the efforts of others, there are a thousand cowodi who follow God's trail more resolutely because of their example. This success withheld from them in life God multiplied and continues to multiply as a memorial to their obedience and his faithfulness.

Steve Saint moved in 1995 to Ecuador with his wife and children to work with the Huaorani people to build an airport and a hospital. This article appears as a chapter in Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith, edited by Susan Bergman (Harper San Francisco).

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In the not-too-distant past, Kenneth Kantzer says, evangelicalism almost “went the way of the dodo and the dinosaur.” “By 1930,” he says, “the centers of American culture had become solidly unevangelical if not antievangelical.” Carl F. H. Henry adds to this picture by calling “our century … one of the most turning and churning times in the history of humanity. Nowhere in the religious history of the West have the controlling beliefs of society changed so swiftly and as radically as in our twentieth-century struggle between theism and naturalism.”

Both of these leaders, along with a host of others from various sectors, lived through this tumultuous period of ideological realignment and contended vigorously for the preservation and advancement of the faith of the Reformation. Because of their vision, tenacity, and theological acuity, evangelicalism as we know it today was able to regroup and rise from its nadir point of the thirties and, thankfully, did not go the way of the dodo.

Kenneth Kantzer earned a Ph.D. at Harvard and has taught at Wheaton College, served as dean of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and as editor of Christianity Today from 1978 to 1982. Carl Henry has earned two doctorates (from Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and from Boston University), has taught at Northern, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and served as the first editor of Christianity Today, from 1956 to 1968. He has written many books, including the six-volume set God, Revelation, and Authority (1976-83).

John Woodbridge, professor of church history at Trinity, and CT associate editor Wendy Murray Zoba interviewed Drs. Kantzer and Henry, getting them to reflect on the battles waged and won in the forties and fifties, on issues more recently confronting contemporary evangelicalism, and on their vision for the future.

Most Christians are not familiar with your personal lives. Would you tell us something about your family backgrounds?

Henry: I was the oldest of eight children. As children we were sent to the Episcopal church for Sunday school. My parents were German immigrants, hard working, who became citizens. But they were merely nominal Christians. We had no prayers at table, no Bible, no devotions. The first Bible I ever had I pilfered from the pew racks of the Episcopal church.

Kantzer: My parents were loyal Lutherans, but knew very little about basic Lutheran doctrine. They were trying to be good enough so that in the final judgment they would pass muster and, hopefully, get into heaven. They were kind parents who felt that all children should go to Sunday school. In church I learned the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments, and how a good Christian ought to live. Yet the gospel never came through to me. I’m sure the pastor believed it, but it never registered with me.

How did you come to a saving knowledge of Christ?

Henry: I was working as a suburban reporter for the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, which led me finally to a position as an editor of a Long Island weekly. My thoughts at that time were shaped by the secular environment, except for the hour in Sunday school. About that time a University of Pennsylvania alumnus took an interest in me and made an appointment with me, which I broke three times. But even after that, he drove 50 miles to see me, and we talked for three hours about the implications of a Christian faith. My friend asked whether I would pray with him. He prayed the Lord’s Prayer, and I prayed it after him. God met me in that prayer. From the Episcopal services I remembered the words “we look to the shed blood of Christ and are thankful.” It all came together in that moment. I would have readily gone to China for Christ the very next day.

Kantzer: In high school, I rebelled against my parents’ religion. I considered myself an atheist throughout the rest of my high-school period. Later in college there was a strong group of students in an organization called the League of Evangelical Students -a forerunner of InterVarsity. I would go to them with the question: How in the world do you believe all of this? They would recommend books for me to read, and over the course of a year I came to a firm faith in Christ.

But I ran into serious problems about how to harmonize my new faith with what I was learning in college. My friends directed me to the works of a Swiss theologian named Gaussen. I found some significant help in his two volumes, one on the Canon and one on inspiration, though there were still many problems that Gaussen didn’t solve. Through this period, during the late forties, I became acquainted with Karl Barth and C. S. Lewis. Other circ*mstances being different, humanly speaking, I could have become a follower of Barth.

Then I spent nine months at Ohio State University and got a master’s degree in modern history. While there, I decided that if I was ever going to have peace of mind I’d better get some of these questions settled. Skepticism sometimes drives people to seminaries more than anything else. In my second year of seminary, my teacher assigned us a paper on Christ’s view of Scripture. I worked hard on it, aided by Warfield’s volume on inspiration and authority. This paper convinced me that I had to think more deeply about the whole structure of my religious convictions. I had to face up to the issue of whether Jesus Christ really was my Lord. If I took his lordship seriously, then I had to hold that Scripture is a trustworthy document that I need to depend on for my thought and life.

Looking back

Both of you thought that conservative Protestantism had reached a nadir by the thirties and forties. What was the situation then?

Kantzer: There was a nadir-no question about it. If you listed the ten largest seminaries in that period, I doubt whether any of them would have been known as evangelical institutions. Today if you list the ten largest seminaries in the United States you’ll find most are evangelical. If you wanted to go to seminary back then, the pickings were poor. The seminary I went to had ten new students that year, and that was the biggest class they’d ever had.

Henry: Before the turn of this century, World Evangelical Alliance conferences were rallying evangelicals in the face of the ascending force of the modernist churches. Between 1910 and 1915, you had the appearance of The Fundamentals, that nationally circulated series of books stating the controlling principles of the Christian revelation.

I date the modernist period from 1900 to 1940. By 1925, Barth said that in Germany modernism was dead, but he meant Hegelian modernism primarily. It took about ten years in those days for the trends in Germany to come across the Atlantic. The Federal Council of Churches was formed in the forepart of the century, and increasingly the denominations were taken over by modernists. They channeled brilliant young scholars to study in Germany, who then returned to teaching positions in American religious colleges and seminaries. By 1930, at least 25 percent of the churches were dominated by modernism.

The first book in English about neo-orthodoxy appeared in the 1930s in England. The year 1940 marked the rise of neo-orthodoxy on the American scene. Neo-orthodoxy, curiously, penetrated the backslidden seminaries and religious colleges much more than the secular universities, which were embracing secular humanism.

Kantzer: In the period up to the middle thirties, if Time magazine wanted a religious voice for the American scene they would go to Harry Emerson Fosdick. He was the primary public voice for religion-not merely for modernism, but for all Christians and religious people-certainly for all Protestants. After the middle thirties, Reinhold Niebuhr became the authority. He would be called neo-orthodox, since he was a left-wing dialectical thinker. He represented Protestant Christianity to the media. Toward the latter part of this century, Time went to Martin Marty, who was a step farther to the right. Did you notice the recent issue of Time magazine that spoke about supernaturalism and the resurrection? The most effectively quoted persons in that article were two convinced evangelicals. That says a lot to me about the extent of the change on our national scene.

In 1942, the National Association of Evangelicals was founded in keeping with Harold Ockenga’s concern to represent the unvoiced multitudes of conservative Christians. As you interacted with these developments, how did you discriminate between those you called “fundamentalist” and those who wanted to call themselves “evangelical”?

Kantzer: Originally, fundamentalists were evangelicals who held to an orthodox Protestant faith. Later, because of their belligerence in fighting modernists (and sometimes, also, each other), there was a tendency to adopt separation as their way of meeting the modernist takeover of schools and churches. Unfortunately, in their revolt against modernism, they sometimes failed to recognize the human aspects of Scripture and of Christ, and so the term fundamentalist became an embarrassment instead of a badge of honor. [J. Gresham] Machen never wished to be called a fundamentalist. I felt the same way.

If somebody called me a fundamentalist back then, I would say, “What do you mean by a fundamentalist? A person who believes the Bible was dictated by God? Or who rejects modern science? I don’t agree with those notions. But if you mean one who agrees with the basic traditional evangelical faith according to the Bible as worked out by the Protestant Reformers and their successors, I stand unequivocally for that.”

Dr. Henry, in 1947 you wrote The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. In this book, were you trying to distance yourself from fundamentalism in order to found a new movement?

Henry: Not at all. The book was a critique of fundamentalism in terms of its own positioning in the cultural arena. Fundamentalists had largely withdrawn from societal outreach. As far as I was concerned, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism was an effort to restate where fundamentalism ought to be in the light of its own heritage.

Kantzer: Many of us living at the time never saw ourselves as rebelling against fundamentalism. I saw myself as part of a group of believers who didn’t know where to find a Bible-believing educated pastor. They felt helpless, caught in a culture-wide drift that seemed irresistible. I wanted to help that group of believers. They were my people.

In some evangelical churches I would be under suspicion because I had a Ph.D. from a radical university. They had been burned too often by theological modernists who had infiltrated their school or church. In such churches I would make clear that I held Holy Scripture to be entirely trustworthy, that I believed in the deity of Jesus Christ and in his bodily resurrection from the dead. But I also made clear that I did not hold to ideas like a dictation theory of inspiration. Or that Jesus was not also fully human. Or that because an idea was set forth by modernists, it had to be wrong.

When did tensions begin to emerge between fundamentalists and evangelicals?

Henry: I would go back to 1941, when Carl McIntire beat the NAE to the draw by founding the American Council of Christian Churches. The extreme Right of the fundamentalist movement made up much of McIntire’s movement and adopted a separatist mode.

Kantzer: The fundamentalists came to be thought of increasingly as “second-degree separationists,” who wished not only to separate themselves from modernists and unbelievers, but also from any who belonged to organizations or denominations that openly fostered modernist theology. Many so-called fundamentalists did not adhere to these views. By calling themselves evangelical they hoped to avoid such charges. They wished to hold on to the fundamental doctrines, but they didn’t reject the idea of social action for the public good. They were deeply committed to justice. They were not trying to foist their religion upon the nation by law. Many, including Dr. [Harold] Ockenga, who became their spokesman, were strongly committed to their mainline denominational heritage and did not wish to separate themselves from it.

Henry: The evangelical movement with its concern to articulate a Christian world-and-life view found that the fundamentalist movement’s emphasis on five doctrinal points-the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth and divinity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection, and the second coming of Christ-was much better suited for exposing the compromises of the modernist than for creating a framework for biblical theology. The modernists would say that Jesus survived death, but the fundamentalist would ask, Did he rise bodily? The modernist would speak about the supernatural birth of Jesus; the fundamentalist would ask if he was virgin born. These were serviceable ways of exposing the theological nakedness of the modernist. But they did not serve as comprehensively as did, let’s say, Barth’s God Reveals Himself! The evangelicals began to assume what the fundamentalists never did assume-the costly burden of creating an evangelical scholarship in a world that’s in rebellion.

At the time, was there a widespread fear in certain conservative circles that young people might lose their faith if they attended secular colleges?

Kantzer: The fear was very real, and there was reason for it. You’ve got to remember that almost all the accredited colleges and great universities, and most of the best theological seminaries with good libraries and learned faculty who were writing the books, were solidly against evangelical faith. Youngsters who went to those schools often did get shaken in their faith.

In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll talks about a tradition of anti-intellectualism among evangelicals. Did you feel the impact of this tradition in the 1950s?

Kantzer: Underneath there was some anti-intellectualism, but it was not the dominant aspect of the movement. Most fundamentalists believed that the life of the mind was important, but they didn’t know what to do about it. Accredited colleges were liberal. The seminaries were liberal. Young people went to these schools and turned aside from evangelical faith. In most cases, opposition was not so much against the life of the mind, but against the life of the mind that was being cultivated in these liberal schools. It was a dangerous thing to go to seminary.

George Marsden has written about the founding of Fuller Seminary. What were the circ*mstances, Dr. Henry, of your becoming a professor there?

Henry: Wilbur Smith, who was professor of English Bible at Moody Bible Institute, spoke in chapel at Northern Baptist Seminary. As he left, he said to me, “Has Harold Ockenga been in touch with you?” I said no. “Well, he will be,” said Smith. That was the first hint I had that there was something in the air.

We had a prayer meeting at one of the downtown hotels in Chicago. I argued against launching the seminary that fall. It was already May. But Charles Fuller said he’d make an announcement on the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour, and we’d have all the students we needed.

After a second prayer meeting in June, we were constrained to go ahead. When we began, we had 27 or more students -many from big universities and many of them saying that they had a clear call for ministry but were uncertain about where to attend seminary. The news about Fuller was to them a providential signal that they belonged there.

Given your happy days at Fuller, was it difficult for you to leave in order to assume the editorship of the new journal Christianity Today?

Henry: Yes, indeed. At Christianity Today we were always short one staff member. It was a six-day, and even a seven-day, job. Nevertheless, it gave tremendous influence to the evangelical movement. And in those early years, the mail was voluminous from people on all sides of the theological spectrum. CT had a role in identifying worldwide evangelical scholarship, so that if ever evangelicals were to launch a Christian university, as at that time I hoped they might, CT would have already identified around the world most of the evangelical leaders who were cognitively equipped and had literary gifts.

Kantzer: I accepted the editorship of Christianity Today in response to a request of Billy Graham in 1977. But I never considered myself as primarily an editor. I always considered myself as a theologian who was editing in order to do a job that needed to be done.

I think the great period of CT was while Carl was there, because the magazine was so desperately needed, and on so many things it set the record straight, showing that evangelicals are not necessarily numbskulls.

But when I went to CT, I faced the fact that the large gifts that kept it financially afloat were going to drop to zero. The magazine had to be given more popular appeal if it were to survive. At the same time, I tried to keep the magazine theologically on track, to keep a focus on the evangelical world-and-life view, and to interact with movements and trends both inside and beyond evangelicalism. I think to a large extent that has been the motivating focus with ct ever since.

In summary, what would you say were early key elements of the post-World War II evangelical resurgence?

Henry: 1947 was a turning year. It was the year in which Uneasy Conscience appeared and Fuller was established. Two years later Billy Graham gained national headlines because of the Los Angeles tent meetings. Hearst’s word to his editors to “puff Graham” made him a national figure, and evangelical evangelism became front-page news. We launched the Rose Bowl Easter Sunrise Service that continued for 25 years. In 1950 Graham and Ockenga both spoke in the Rose Bowl, addressing the largest attendance ever at any religious gathering in the Pacific Southwest. All of this signaled a new day.

Kantzer: In addition to the leadership by Billy Graham and Carl Henry at Christianity Today, I would add the founding and growth of scores of evangelical seminaries and graduate schools of theology, the renewed social conscience and sense of political responsibility among evangelicals, a sense of moral obligation and a duty to sacrifice, the religious bankruptcy of older modernism, the recognition (triggered by the Pentecostal/ charismatic movement) that evangelical faith involves emotion and will as well as the mind, and that evangelical faith is a bulwark against moral and spiritual drift. I would be unfaithful if I did not also note the sovereign Spirit of God, who is like the wind that “blows wherever it pleases.”

The evangelical movement today and tomorrowShould there have been a “Battle for the Bible” in recent evangelical history?

Kantzer: Of course! Though the central focus between faith and nonfaith is not the battle for the Bible, but the question of who Jesus Christ is and what are we going to do with him. But the role of the Bible is a very important subsidiary issue. Luther had it right: Christ is the baby, and the Bible is the crib. You don’t worship the crib; but if you want to preserve the baby, you don’t throw the crib out and put your baby in the street. But if the central issue of the gospel of Christ is kept in clear focus, then the place we give to the Bible becomes equally clear.

Henry: There is a danger in shifting the question from objective truth to subjective trust. To talk about the trustworthiness of Scripture, rather than inerrancy, focuses not on the cognitive but rather on the volitional. Because the times have changed, some today treat the inerrancy of Scripture as an evangelical distinctive but not as an evangelical essential. In both of those points you can get into trouble. If you admit error in Scripture, and then go, for example, to Yale or Chicago or any divinity school where people take a critical view of Scripture, then you come out with conflicting pictures of the Lord. You can’t fully detach the question of the identity of Christ from the prior question of the trustworthiness of Scripture.

Could you define inerrancy a little more fully?Kantzer: The word inerrancy is derived from two Latin words meaning “not wandering.” And common usage supplies the object: “not wandering from the truth.” When the Scripture tells us something, it is telling us the truth and nothing false. To use an old InterVarsity phrase, inerrancy is the entire trustworthiness of the Scripture to direct thought and life. If you interpret Scripture properly, you have truth; and not only truth, but divine authority for our belief and behavior.

Henry: The 1949 founding statement of the Evangelical Theological Society reads: “The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written, and therefore inerrant in the autographs.” The 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states that “inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.”

Some argue today that certain definitions of inerrancy have been shaped more by an Enlightenment heritage of “common sense realism” than by biblical categories. What are your thoughts about that?Henry: An Enlightenment rationalism has penetrated some aspects of the theological debate, especially in the evangelical reliance on empirical proofs where God’s existence is not grounded in his revelation but rather in nature, the pattern of history, or in the mind or conscience of man. But to contend that inerrancy and propositional revelation are fruits of Enlightenment rationalism, I think, is an evasive tactic. It obscures what is really a departure from objective scriptural revelation and makes a concession which involves a shift in epistemic controls.

Kantzer: Different evangelicals appeal to quite varied grounds for holding to the divine inspiration and truth of Scripture. I don’t deny that a person can be an evangelical in some sense without committing himself clearly to inerrancy. Yet this is a basically inconsistent position. I should call such a person a liberal evangelical or an inconsistent evangelical. How consistent is it to affirm that the Bible is entirely trustworthy and at the same time argue that it contains error?

Part of the problem is the use of the expression “propositional truth.” In ordinary language, when we use the word proposition, we think immediately in terms of Euclid’s geometry. Carl and most evangelicals who use that term don’t intend that sense at all. They mean true statements.

What is your assessment of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement?Henry: I share the concern about the erosion of Judeo-Christian values in the public arena and the need for cobelligerency in that area. I do think, however, that the effort ran ahead of the evangelical constituency. Evangelicals were not fully prepared for the statement. And there was some ambiguity in the terminology, as was conceded in subsequent meetings, which aimed to rectify this.

Kantzer: I agree. I do not for a moment deny the Christianity of any true Roman Catholic. Many Roman Catholics are certainly evangelical. We share the faith of the Apostles’ Creed and the seven ecumenical councils of the ancient church. We need each other in our battles against secularism and materialism. Yet there are crucial differences that we dare not gloss over, like the hierarchical authoritarianism of the Roman clergy and the gospel of salvation by grace through faith.

At a personal level, what has been the role of prayer in keeping you centered in your own evangelical faith?Kantzer: Prayer lies at the heart of the Christian faith. I think it is a part of my duty and privilege as a Christian to pray to God, though I don’t consider myself a great prayer warrior. I don’t spend as much time as I ought to spend in prayer daily, but I do have a time for prayer every day. My wife and I have a time of devotional reading of the Scripture and prayer every day.

One of the worst memories I have is of a particular evening prayer time. My then five-year-old daughter loved to pray, and she felt exceedingly pious that night. She began to pray all around the world for all her classmates and her friends and her relatives. And I think it was about 15 minutes at least, maybe longer. And finally I broke into it and said, “Now I think it’s time we say amen.” I wished I’d never done that. I wasn’t patient enough with my daughter.

Henry: We had our devotions and discussion in the evening when the children were at home with us. In the years since the children have flown away-my son, Paul, now with his Lord-we have our devotions in the morning after breakfast. We read Scripture, mention special concerns and needs, and pray. I have the gift of a wife who is a woman of great prayer, of missionary interests, and of great faith. And that has been a wonderful blessing through the years. We walked together through the experience of the loss of our son with our hands in the hands of the risen Lord.

How can the next generation keep the evangelical fires burning?Kantzer: We evangelicals need to develop a biblically based world-view and find ways of communicating this to our children and to our world. That involves getting an educated ministry and teachers and particularly penetrating the purveyors of ideas in the public media. Harvard and Yale started primarily with the idea of training men for the ministry. Even Columbia University was started that way. Somehow we have to instill in the minds of our converts and children that they have a commitment to represent Christ in a pagan world, and that they need to present him as a solution to the problems of the mind as well as the heart. Education can’t be neglected or our pagan culture is going to overwhelm us. And we’ll find ourselves very quickly with, instead of 40 percent of the people in church on Sundays, 5 percent or less, like in Germany. Or England, where it’s 2 or 3 percent.

Most of all, we need committed membership in every local church. Only by that means can we reach the disillusioned ones who no longer find liberalism or modernism a viable way to a life that satisfies the mind and the heart.

Henry: The biggest asset that any religion can have is truth. You might say redemption; but Christianity can’t be redemptive unless it’s true. Two things are to be said about the younger generation. There are those who deliberately widen the term evangelical to accommodate their deviations. That is ultimately destructive because it tends to undermine any clear sense of norm. The other is that there is an amazing creativity in the younger generation. I think, for example, of young Christian Koreans when there was a shortage of blood some years ago. They donated blood in vials that bore the legend: “In gratitude for the shed blood of Jesus Christ.”

God can take someone wholly outside the reach of a lethargic church. He can reach someone like C. S. Lewis, who did not come through the inherited institution, or someone like Chuck Colson, who was on the margin of the evangelical society. Or someone like myself, brought up outside an evangelical heritage. The evangelical movement can still make gains that exceed any made this side of the apostolic age, including the Reformation. But they will come only in the context of the bended knee and the throbbing heart.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The evangelical movement has been evaluated recently in a very pessimistic manner in books such as No Place for Truth, by David F. Wells, and The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, by Mark A. Noll. Both authors are distinguished members of the evangelical community. But while they call attention to the defects and limitations of evangelicalism, they show an inadequate appreciation for positive factors and achievements that reflect God’s blessing on this movement.

As one who last year celebrated 50 years of seminary teaching, I may be in a position to add something on the positive side of the ledger: the gains of evangelicals in the United States since 1945.

Seminaries. In 1945, only a handful of seminaries that were accredited members of the American Association of Theological Schools could clearly rate as evangelical. In 1995, there were 125 accredited Protestant seminaries in the United States. Of these, 55, or 44 percent of the total, are clearly evangelical. This figure shows a spectacular shift in the center of gravity of theological education in this country.Students. In 1945, a large majority of seminary graduates were from liberal seminaries; this was often interpreted as a sign that evangelicalism was dying and that the future lay with the progressive mainline churches. In 1995, full-time equivalency enrollment records show that students in evangelical seminaries almost equaled those in other seminaries (19,116 compared to 21,679). Add to this the fact that many evangelical students are studying in mainline seminaries (sometimes because of denominational pressure), and that the majority of conservative doctoral students are choosing liberal schools because of their superior libraries and international prestige. Since many students enrolled in more liberal institutions eventually choose not to become pastors, it is likely that before too long the number of evangelicals occupying pulpits in the U.S. will increase substantially.Seminary professors. In 1945, many smaller churches were served by ministers who did not have a seminary degree. Many were graduates only of Bible institutes; the Bible institute professors often did not hold a respectable academic doctorate. Many evangelical seminary professors also did not have a doctorate; those who did often had obtained it from the very school in which they were teaching. Further, their teaching load was excessive (sometimes 15 to 18 credit-hours a week), their salary was often so inadequate they needed to supplement it by preaching or doing other time-consuming activities, and no sabbatical program was in place to give professors a substantial amount of time for research and reflection. Thus, the academic stature of evangelical schools was unimpressive.In 1995, the situation is dramatically different. All accredited institutions have a majority of professors with earned doctorates from a variety of schools. In the Orlando branch of the seminary where I teach, there are 16 resident faculty members (including the president). They hold earned doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Duke, Princeton, Edinburgh, Baylor, Syracuse, Gordon Divinity School, Harvard (2), University of Central Florida, Georgia State, and Vanderbilt; and they have other graduate degrees from Westminster (6), Fuller, Trinity, Covenant, Union (Richmond), the Sorbonne, Brown, Simmons, and Boston University. This is one of the most richly diversified faculties I know, and all its members are resolute upholders of the inerrancy of Scripture.

Libraries. In 1945, the great Protestant theological collections were at Union Theological Seminary (New York), Garrett, Princeton, Hartford, Harvard, Colgate-Rochester, and General Theological Seminary. To my knowledge, these were the only Protestant seminaries that had 100,000 volumes or more. Most of these collections were in the Northeast. By comparison, evangelical seminaries were poorly equipped. For instance, Gordon Divinity School had only about 5,000 volumes after its own collection was merged with the personal library of Dean Burton L. Goddard.In 1995, at least 25 evangelical seminaries have libraries exceeding 100,000 volumes, the largest being Calvin Theological Seminary with 478,000 volumes. Gordon-Conwell now has over 150,000 volumes, a growth of 3,000 percent since 1945. A similar rate of growth in the next 50 years would mean a library of 4,500,000 volumes by 2045!

Publications. In 1945, a common complaint was that evangelicals were not producing works of scholarship in biblical, historical, and theological disciplines, let alone philosophy, psychology, sociology, and other fields less closely related to the seminary curriculum. Some of our greatest scholars-B. B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen, and Abraham Kuyper-had died. Evangelicals were chided for relying on book reprints, and the great publishing companies (Scribners, Harper’s, Macmillan, and Oxford) turned their backs on evangelical production.By 1995, we were facing an entirely different situation. Besides Bible translations by individuals, teams of evangelical scholars have produced a number of new translations of the whole Bible, including the Berkeley Version (1959) and the New International Version (1978). The niv has been for several years the best-selling English translation, and is thus probably the best-selling book in the world.

Evangelicals have authored three multi-volume Bible encyclopedias: the Zondervan Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Bible, the almost entirely rewritten International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, and Colin Brown’s The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. Numerous Bible commentaries have been published, including those on individual books and series, such as the Expositor’s Bible Commentary, the New International Commentary on the New Testament and New International Commentary on the Old Testament, the Word Bible Commentary, and the Hendriksen-Kistemaker New Testament Commentary Series.

There are evangelical introductions to and biblical theologies of the Old and New Testaments, not to speak of numerous monographs in biblical archaeology, history, hermeneutics, and linguistics. Evangelical output in systematic theology has been massive and challenging. Those of a liberal mind seem to have almost abandoned this area in favor of the philosophy of religion or the study of world religions.

Evangelicals have produced works on history, psychology, pastoral theology, homiletics, family relations, the devotional life, denominational distinctives, and scores of other subjects. The problem in 1945 was that we had relatively few new conservative books; the problem now is that there are so many that few people can afford to purchase all those they would like to own.

Periodicals. In 1945, the great success and circulation of denominational weeklies was waning. Some magazines like the Sunday School Times, the Christian Herald, and the Banner were still functioning. The Westminster Theological Journal, the Concordia Theological Monthly, and Bibliotheca Sacra were perhaps the most effective evangelical scholarly journals at the time.In 1995, there are a great many evangelical organs, probably more than 30 quarterlies to which even liberal schools subscribe. Christianity Today’s distribution has long since exceeded that of the highly prized liberal Christian Century.

Foreign missions. In 1945, American missions were still under the painful impact of the liberal “Rethinking Missions” agenda, which basically proposed to make the missionary endeavor a philanthropic movement of social and physical assistance and to renounce efforts to propagate the Christian faith in heathen lands. Naturally, evangelical people at home and abroad strongly opposed an approach that reversed the whole missionary movement since the days of William Carey.In spite of such obstacles, the work of evangelical missions has greatly progressed in numbers and influence. The churches and denominations with strong missionary incentive have continued to grow, in contrast to many mainline churches that have shown a marked decline in the last decade.

Evangelism. Missions and evangelism are twins. They have their common origin in a conviction that people without Christ are lost, and that God commands that the gospel be preached to every creature (Matt. 28:19).In 1945, Billy Graham was just another recent graduate from the evangelical Wheaton College. No one could anticipate the extraordinary way in which God would empower and sustain him so as to reach more people with the gospel in 50 years than any other person in the history of the church.

In 1995, evangelicals should be grateful to God for the fruitfulness of the Holy Spirit in his life. Thank God Billy Graham had a place for the truth!

Social consciousness. In 1945, in part because liberals had endorsed social consciousness and activity as their main activity, evangelicals had become suspicious of it. In the process, we forgot that many of the most significant efforts to remedy social ills had their beginning in evangelical efforts and were the logical outcome of true gospel zeal.In 1995, a more balanced approach may be observed: the gospel is not replaced by social endeavors, but social ministries are not shunted aside on the pretext that there is “no value in rearranging the chairs on the deck of the sinking Titanic.” In fact, evangelical institutions such as World Vision, World Relief, and Samaritan’s Purse are international leaders in aid and development work.

Asign of the maturing of evangelical thought is the presence of significant authors who concern themselves with the history and sociology of evangelicalism, such persons as Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, Mark Noll, and David Wells. Their Christian experience was formed in an evangelical milieu, and they are a product of God’s grace in the midst of the evangelical community.We admire their scholarship and brilliance, and we should heed their warnings and recognize the validity of their criticisms. Their recent dominantly negative tone is disappointing, however. Hence this article.

As one who has been privileged to participate in the movement these past 50 years, I humbly bow my knees in gratitude to the Lord and pray that in the future God may continue to bless and to guide, to keep us from errant ways, and to use the evangelical witness as salt in the midst of a decaying civilization. To paraphrase Deuteronomy 8:2: Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these 50 years.

Roger Nicole is professor of theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, Florida.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Last updated: September 3, 1996

“The Liberator has come!” With that declaration, African-American evangelist Tom Skinner concluded his keynote address at Urbana ’70, InterVarsity’s missions conference in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The gathering of more than 11,000 college students leaped to its feet, exploding in applause and cheers.

Jesus Christ was the “radical” Liberator whom Skinner proclaimed. But for the hundreds of young African-American evangelicals scattered across that assembly hall, Skinner himself was a liberator-their ambassador to the white evangelical church. At last, their struggles and concerns had the chance for a legitimate hearing.

There had been a buzz in the air at Urbana even before Tom Skinner took the stage. College students from all over the U.S. had descended on the campus during the last five days of 1970 to study their Bibles, sing hymns, and hear such speakers as John Stott and Leighton Ford talk about discipleship and world evangelization. But on the second evening of the event, with Skinner at the helm, the student missions conference made a significant departure from its usual program.

In its ninth triennial offering, the Urbana convention had become an influential and highly anticipated occasion, where countless young adults made decisions to enter full-time Christian service. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (Urbana’s sponsor) was known as one of the evangelical movement’s premier campus ministries. And the Urbana conference was its prime laboratory for mobilization and renewal.

But there had also been controversy surrounding the event. Three years earlier at Urbana ’67, about 60 African-American students, all InterVarsity members, had come to the conference with idealistic notions of finding a connecting point for their black evangelical sentiments. What they found instead was a “white” event, not only in terms of attendance, but also in terms of vision. For the black attendee, there seemed a disregard for the presence and needs of students from non-Anglo cultures.

“I went there bright-eyed and naïve,” remembers Carl Ellis, then a sophom*ore at the historically black Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia. “But it didn’t take long for me to realize something wasn’t right. I didn’t see anybody from my neighborhood there. I didn’t see anyone talking about missions to the cities or about the concerns of the black population. And I said to myself, ‘I hope these people aren’t deliberately doing this.’ “

Ellis and other African-American students who had the same misgivings tempered their frustration by an unshakable commitment to the biblical ideals of evangelicalism. But if they could not find fellowship and encouragement through organizations such as InterVarsity, where were they to go?

The students gathered for an impromptu prayer meeting that went on for hours. “We weren’t planning on staying up all night,” Ellis continues, “but it was an evening of absolute, fervent prayer that God would raise up an army of African Americans who would be able to minister to our community, our people.”

After Urbana ’67, Carl Ellis and others recruited and campaigned to ensure the next Urbana convention would not be without a notable black presence. Ellis, Hampton Institute’s InterVarsity president, was named to the national advisory committee for Urbana ’70. He convinced InterVarsity that a 28-year-old African-American evangelist by the name of Tom Skinner should be added to the list of plenary speakers. As a result, in 1970, more than 500 black students and Christian leaders flocked to the Urbana convention. The black evangelical renaissance that the students had prayed about three years earlier actually felt within reach.

As the winter of 1970 approached and Skinner officially signed on to speak, there arose a confidence among young black evangelicals across the nation that a new day was imminent: Urbana ’70 was going to be different.

In 1970, Tom Skinner was no stranger to high-profile, ground-breaking positions. Christian radio listeners had heard his weekly teaching program. Thousands had packed venues across the U.S. and in countries as far away as Guyana to hear his streetwise, yet intellectually stimulating preaching. Before his untimely death in 1994, Skinner had influenced a wide audience of both black and white church leaders, theologians, business executives, politicians, social activists, entertainers, and professional athletes.

“Tom was the most visible black evangelical we had at that time who was willing to tell the truth,” says Johnnie Skinner, the late evangelist’s younger brother and a Baptist minister in Knoxville, Tennessee. “It was extremely difficult for any black leader in that type of position to tell the hard truth all the time, but he was trying.”

“Tom Skinner had the clearest understanding of the gospel of anyone that I’ve ever heard, and he was able to articulate that,” adds John Perkins, evangelist and publisher of Urban Family magazine. “He understood the importance of ‘on earth as it is in heaven,’ and that was the heart of his message-living out the kingdom of God. He was a prophet without honor because he was hitting at themes of reconciliation that were too radical for blacks and whites alike.”

A Double Life

Skinner was born a Baptist preacher’s son in the concrete environs of Harlem, New York. A gifted child, he was aware of his intellect at an early age: “By the time I was 14 I could tell you the difference between existentialism and rationalism; between Freudian psychology and behavioristic psychology,” he wrote in his 1968 autobiography, Black and Free.

Although religion was a part of Skinner’s life from the beginning, growing up in inner-city New York gave it little credibility in his estimation. “As a teenager I looked around and I asked my father where God was in all this,” he wrote. “I couldn’t for the life of me see how God, if He cared for humanity at all, could allow the conditions that existed in Harlem.”

Despite his father’s role as a minister, Skinner had come to believe that Christianity was the religion of the American white man. “All the pictures of Christ I saw were the pictures of an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Protestant Republican,” he remarked in his Urbana address. “And I said, ‘There is no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ. … He doesn’t look like he could survive in my neighborhood.’ “

During his teen years, Skinner began leading a double life. By day he was president of his high-school student body, a member of the basketball team, president of the Shakespearean Club, and an active member of his church’s youth department. But come nightfall, Skinner could be found among the Harlem Lords, one of New York’s most notorious street gangs. Under Skinner’s leadership, the Lords rioted, looted, robbed, and assaulted other gangs for turf and respect.

He kept up this double existence for several years without his parents’ knowledge. But the young man’s tortured duality came to a head on the eve of what Skinner expected would be the largest and most significant gang fight ever in New York City. “It would have involved five gangs,” Skinner wrote in his book If Christ Is the Answer (1973). “If I were to succeed in leading the fellows to victory … I would emerge as … the most powerful leader in the area.”

But as Skinner prepared for the brawl, God-and a rock-‘n’-roll radio station-interrupted.

At 9 p.m., Skinner expected to hear his favorite deejay’s radio show. However, on this particular night, “an unscheduled program came on and a man began to speak from 2 Corinthians 5:17 … ‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!’ ” The man sounded rough and unpolished, the kind of preacher Skinner found distasteful. But Skinner could not stop listening: “He went on to tell me that Jesus Christ was the only person who ever lived who was both the truth about God and the truth about man. … I could never be what God intended me to be without inviting this Christ-who died on the cross because He was capable of forgiving me of my sins, and who rose again from the dead-to live in me. Apart from Him I could never become a new person.”

Years of anger, deceit, and violence had turned the 17-year-old Skinner into a disheartened, conscienceless young man with no regard for the consequences of his actions. But the Word of God, delivered by an uneducated radio preacher, broke through a wall of hatred and disillusionment. Skinner bowed his head and challenged Jesus Christ to turn his life around.

Leaving a street gang was tricky business. Few had voluntarily left the Harlem Lords without losing their lives. So when Skinner went to his 129 fellow gang members to announce he was quitting, he knew he would probably not leave the room alive.

Terrified, Skinner informed the gangb*ngers that he had accepted Christ into his life and that he could no longer be a member of the Harlem Lords. Not one sound came from the bewildered gang. Skinner turned to leave the room. Still, no response.

To his astonishment, Skinner left the room a free-and unharmed-man. Later, the gang member who had been Skinner’s second-in-command told him that he wanted to kill him that night but that a strange force prevented him. Skinner went on to lead that young man and several other members of the Harlem Lords to faith in Christ. That marked the end of the agnostic gang leader and the beginning of the Harlem evangelist.

Like a street-smart apostle Paul, Skinner immediately began preaching on the streets of Harlem to a ready-made audience of prostitutes, drug dealers, and homeless people. He also ministered to the youth of Harlem, particularly its gang members. He spoke at neighborhood churches and became a respected figure in the community. Soon Skinner teamed with a group of 12 young, influential church and community leaders in Harlem to form the Harlem Evangelistic Association (HEA), an organized effort to reach the inner city with the gospel.

With Skinner named as its chief evangelist, the HEA scheduled its first major crusade for the summer of 1962 at the Apollo Theatre. The group took a crash course in crusade planning and was able to gather the people and resources needed to make the event happen. In the process, however, Skinner began to sense the dilemma of being a young black evangelical in America. When the hea approached white evangelicals in New York whom they knew had experience in crusade development, they were met with “cold shoulders.” Skinner wrote in Black and Free:

I then became aware of how so many white evangelicals are willing to say that the Negro community needs Christ and needs the preaching of the Gospel, but when it comes to action, they are not willing to join forces with brave and uncompromising Negro evangelicals who make the Gospel of Christ relevant in such a community.

But it was not only from the white evangelical community that the hea felt resistance. Blacks were likewise suspicious of this young contingent of black men. Skinner continued:

[We] began to approach Negro evangelical leaders of established reputations in New York City. And again, from many of them, we met polite coldness. They said, “It’s a wonderful thing you’re doing. We’re behind you … we’ll pray for you … but we really can’t get involved.” Minor doctrinal disagreements kept Negro evangelicals from joining together in a cooperative venture such as the one we proposed.

Nevertheless, Skinner and the HEA persevered. During the eight nights of the crusade, thousands of people from both Harlem and the greater New York area gathered to hear Skinner’s messages, breaking attendance records for any single event at the Apollo. Skinner tailored his messages to pique the curiosity of his audience and to address social and economic concerns of African Americans. Those expecting a “black Billy Graham,” as he had been tagged by many, were jolted by Skinner’s unconventional sermons with titles like “The White Man Did It” and “A White Man’s Religion.”

“At several of the rallies I deliberately chose controversial subjects to attract the crowds and challenge them with the claims of Jesus Christ in my own life,” Skinner noted. “I knew the implications, and yet I felt that God was deliberately calling me to go right into the middle of the controversy and make Jesus Christ known.”

By the crusade’s end, more than 2,200 people had responded to Skinner’s presentation of the gospel, and the 20-year-old evangelist was hailed as a preaching phenomenon.

Skinner’s crusade outreach quickly expanded beyond the Harlem community. A radio ministry took Skinner’s phenomenal preaching to listeners throughout the country. Soon, Tom Skinner Crusades was established (which was later changed to Tom Skinner Associates, TSA, when more staff came on board), and the evangelist began speaking on college campuses and at urban arenas throughout the U.S.

Dream Team

William Pannell had a vision for urban ministry within the evangelical church. As the assistant director of leadership training at Youth for Christ (YFC) in the late 1960s, he worked to involve the organization in outreach to his African-American community. He had written an eyebrow-raising book in 1967, titled My Friend the Enemy, which took the white evangelical church to task for what he perceived to be its lack of concern for the holistic gospel message. For many black evangelicals, it was a message to their white counterparts that was long overdue.

Tom Skinner was particularly moved by Pannell’s book and even more so by the man himself. The two men formed an intellectual and spiritual bond. It did not take long for them to find that they shared similar visions for ministry. “As Tom and I talked,” says Pannell, “I realized that perhaps God was telling me that it was time for African Americans to take more responsibility for reaching their communities, and that it would take a black-led organization to make a serious impact.”

In the spring of 1968, Pannell joined Skinner as vice president of TSA. Soon, the ministry assembled a “dream team” lineup of young African-American leaders: Pannell worked to strengthen the crusade outreach and the campus ministry; Henry Greenidge, a musician and minister who had assisted Skinner from the earliest days, settled in as artistic director and leader of TSA’s praise-and-worship band Soul Liberation; and Carl Ellis, briefly courted by InterVarsity, joined Skinner in 1969 as his campus ministry director.

With Pannell on board, TSA began rounding out its evangelistic focus with more prophetic and holistic concerns. According to Pannell, who is now a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, “It was at the point when we put together the evangelistic and the prophetic traditions that we were led back to the motif of the kingdom of God.” He explains, “Our primary concern was to ascertain what Jesus really meant when he said, ‘The kingdom has come.’ What implications does that have for the church today? What does it look like? How does it affect the way we relate to each other? And how should it change our preaching and our follow-up? Those questions affected everything we did.”

In his 1970 volume entitled How Black Is the Gospel? Skinner highlighted the social demands of Christian theology: “The gospel of Jesus Christ must say to a community that is economically powerless, that is politically powerless, that is socially powerless-to an exploited people, to a people who are stepped upon, a people whose past is filled with anguish and sorrow-the message of Jesus Christ must say and does say, ‘Rise up and walk!’ The church must get involved no matter what the cost; and not only in preaching that message but practicing it.”

Skinner’s influence soon generated interest from audiences far wider than those within the African-American community. In fact, according to Richard Parker, Skinner’s crusade director from 1969 to 1973, “the racial make-up of the attendance was about 60 percent white and 40 percent black.”

Parker, who is now senior pastor of Friendship Community Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee, suspects that Skinner’s unconventional approach put off many blacks. “Whites knew of Tom because he was more or less a product of white evangelicalism in terms of his schooling and thought,” Parker says. “But the black church was for the most part very traditional back then, and the thrust of Tom’s message and the way he conducted himself were rather foreign to the older black church.”

Skinner was no fan of the “traditional” black church and had often been bored and sadly amused by what he saw at his father’s church. “Like so many churches across America, in my church there was no real worship,” he explained in Black and Free. “Sunday morning was a time for the people to gather and be stirred by the emotional clichés. … So long as the service was liberally sprinkled with those time-worn phrases, the people felt good.” Consequently, Skinner made no strong efforts to appeal to those within the traditional black church.

In retrospect, Parker believes TSA was too harsh in its critique of traditional black churches. “I don’t think we courted them in the way we should have,” he says. “There were things that were said that denigrated the black church and alienated some of the black ministers across the country.”

The difference between the “traditional” black church and the “evangelical” black church, observes Oberlin College religion scholar Albert G. Miller, was that the “modern black evangelical movement placed more emphasis on its rationalistic or propositional character and thus highlighted doctrine over the experiential and ecstatic.” These differences were addressed with the founding of the National Negro Evangelical Association in 1963 (later the National Black Evangelical Association). The late William H. Bentley, the organization’s leader, recognizing this divide, suggested that most African-American Christians were, in fact, “evangelical” but were just not aware of such terminology.

Skinner occasionally participated in the meetings of the National Negro Evangelical Association, but his increasingly radical rhetoric, along with his emerging concerns about biblical and racial reconciliation, gradually shifted him away from a place of easy alliances.

Shock Tactics

In 1970, the U.S. Civil Rights Act was six years old; both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X were dead; and inner-city race riots were a common feature of the nightly news. The nonviolent resistance of the King era had given way to the militancy exemplified by Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers. A sense of dashed hopes had seized the civil-rights movement. Despite key advances, American race relations appeared stalled. And, in the estimation of many blacks, they were in fact edging backward.

Not coincidentally, just as Skinner’s ministry was attracting more attention from whites, his outspoken views on issues of social injustice facing the black community intensified (a fact that would lead many Christian radio stations to drop his program due to its “political” content).

In countless speeches and in books such as How Black Is the Gospel? and Words of Revolution (1970), Skinner declared Christ as a radical revolutionary, not unlike Barabbas or, by extension, the Black Power revolutionaries of his own day. No-holds-barred presentations of Scripture marked Skinner’s style. In How Black Is the Gospel? Barabbas is portrayed as a violent Jewish insurrectionist, who, with his band of angry “guerrillas,” hurls Molotov co*cktails into the homes of the “honky” Romans in order to usurp the corrupt Roman Empire. And Christ is a revolutionary who agrees with Barabbas about the oppressiveness of the Roman occupation. He wrote: “Jesus would have … said, ‘Barabbas, when you burn the Roman system down, when you have driven the Roman out, … what are you going to replace the system with?’ ” The solution did not lie in the violent overthrow of “the Man,” Skinner said, but rather in a spiritual revolution within men’s minds and hearts.

His freewheeling interpretation was intended to grab his audience’s attention and shock them into a new understanding of Christ. So it was no surprise to Skinner that whites found his assertions harsh and, at times, irreverent. But if the evangelist’s shock tactics were losing him audiences among whites, Skinner’s fan base among African-American students on college campuses was steadily increasing.

Many young black evangelicals, while committed to Christ, had been captivated by the Black Power rhetoric of the late sixties. The Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam constantly challenged black students to abandon any hopes of seeing racial progress within the parameters of white power structures. And the pressure was even greater for young black evangelicals, who were often ridiculed and mocked for adhering to “the white man’s religion.” For them, Tom Skinner’s radical approach to Christianity provided the firepower needed to defend their faith against Black Power assaults.

Ron Potter, a theologian and professor at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, first met Skinner while a student at Wheaton College in the late sixties. According to Potter, the group of African Americans at Wheaton during his era represented the first significant black student presence there. In 1969, Potter’s group rallied to have Skinner speak on the Wheaton campus. “Few black evangelicals in the late sixties were able to take on the charismatic evangelists of the secular Black Power movement,” he says. “But Tom was able to help us address the attacks made upon us.”

He adds that Skinner also assisted Wheaton’s African-American students in responding to racial injustices at their school. “We were experiencing a lot of subtle forms of racism at the time, but we could not describe what it was,” Potter recalls. “Tom was able to articulate for us what we had been feeling. He helped us to differentiate between biblical Christianity and the Christ of the white evangelical culture.”

Kay Coles James, dean of government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and a noted evangelical speaker, was a student at Hampton Institute in the late sixties when Skinner made several visits to that campus. “We were trying to figure out what it meant to be black and Christian in the culture of that day, and we realized we were not going to find all the answers through groups like InterVarsity,” she says. “What we found in Tom Skinner was a towering figure of a man, straight off the streets of Harlem, who had a real connection with our unique needs. He gave us hope and empowered us as Christ’s ambassadors to those blacks on our campus who were skeptical toward Christianity.”

And, to the delight of Potter, James, and hundreds of other young black evangelicals across the nation, this was the Tom Skinner who arrived at the Urbana ’70 missions conference ready to stir 11,000 students to a higher understanding of the gospel message.

Radical Departures

Soul Liberation didn’t look like any other music group that had performed on the Urbana stage. Their afros, multi-colored attire, and Afro-centric symbols made them seem more like a sanctified Sly and the Family Stone than an evangelical praise-and-worship ensemble. And the predominantly white Urbana crowd was not altogether prepared for their style of ministry. The group regularly accompanied Skinner to college campuses and evangelistic rallies, but as the group took the stage to do a song prior to Skinner’s keynote address, the band members knew they would be journeying through uncharted territory.

After a day and a half of singing familiar hymns and choruses, the Urbana crowd was off guard when Soul Liberation started playing the group’s gospel anthem, “Power to the People,” whose lyrics borrowed heavily from Black Power idioms. “It was such a radical departure and so different that people gasped when we began,” says Henry Greenidge, the group’s leader. “Our clothes, the drums, the bass; it was too much for them.”

After initial shock, however, the audience soon jumped to its feet to sing along as it realized the Christo-centric focus of Soul Liberation’s song. For the white students, it was an instant lesson in contemporary black culture.

Greenidge, who is now senior pastor of Irvington Covenant Church in Portland, Oregon, remembers that second night of Urbana ’70 as being “very electric.” “It felt like something historic was happening,” he says. “Tom was our spokesperson, and we knew as soon as we finished he would be giving a major address. I think Tom’s speech and our music had a hand-in-glove effect.”

When Tom Skinner finally stepped to the podium, the crowd was already charged for what they anticipated would be a revolutionary address. The majority of the black students sat together in front of the platform, awaiting sage words from the man who, for at least that evening, would be their Moses.

Skinner began his Urbana address, officially titled “The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism,” with a friendly, humorous warm-up that offered a brief history lesson on the plight of the “Negro” in America. Drawing from secular and biblical sources, the young evangelist dramatically uncovered the sad state of race relations in the U.S. and the American church’s utter failure to address the problem. One by one, Skinner picked apart the issues that held evangelicalism captive to white prejudice and indifference.

On U.S. nationalism: “As a black Christian I have to renounce Americanism. I have to renounce any attempt to wed Jesus Christ off to the American system. I disassociate myself from any argument that says a vote for America is a vote for God. I disassociate myself from any argument which says God sends troops to Asia, that God is a capitalist, that God is a militarist, that God is the worker behind our system.”

On white fears of miscegenation: “I don’t know where white people get the idea that they are so utterly attractive that black people are just dying to marry them.”

On white evangelicals who ignored the plight of the inner city: “If you … told him about the social ills of Harlem, he would say, ‘Christ is the answer!’ Yes, Christ is the answer. But Christ has always been the answer through somebody. It has always been the will of God to saturate the common clay of man’s humanity and then send that man in open display to a hostile world as a living testimony that it is possible for the invisible God to make himself visible in a man.”

After some 20 minutes of provocative preaching, Skinner “brought it home” with a proclamation of a “revolutionary” Savior who had come to “infiltrate” and “overthrow” the existing world order to establish his Father’s kingdom.

At the end, Skinner’s voice scraping its upper registers, he reached for one last elocutionary blitz: “You will never be a radical,” he declared to the students, “until you become a part of [Christ’s] new order, and then go into a world that is enslaved; a world that is filled with hunger and poverty and racism and all those things that are the work of the devil. Proclaim liberation to the captives … go into the world and tell men who are bound mentally, spiritually, and physically, ‘The Liberator has come!’ “

A thunderous and seemingly endless standing ovation, from black and white alike, shook the University of Illinois assembly hall.

“It was incredible,” remembers Ron Potter. “It was like heaven on earth.”

“Tom was absolutely prophetic that night,” says Carl Ellis, now president of Project Joseph, a church renewal ministry in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “I knew several people who were there who just didn’t give a hoot about Christianity, but they were shaken to their foundations that night.”

“That speech was a pinnacle of visionary and prophetic expression,” remarks Albert Miller. “It gave both African Americans and whites a vision of what being a black evangelical Christian could be. That they could actually impact not only a community, but a world.”

But for Pete Hammond, a white InterVarsity leader who helped plan Urbana ’70 to include more African Americans, Skinner’s speech brought ambiguous feelings. “For me, it was a mixture of fear and joy,” he says. “I was fearful that we were going to polarize white evangelicals who had never engaged the subject of race so directly. But I was joyful over seeing young black leaders together in a national position to worship, to celebrate, and to find affirmation and a platform to bring their brilliance to the church.”

William Pannell remembers sitting behind Skinner on the platform as he delivered his address. “It was the most powerful moment that I’ve ever experienced at the conclusion of a sermon,” he says. “For perhaps the first time in the history of the Urbana conferences, not only was a black evangelical a keynote speaker, but he was able to cast the Christian mission in the context of a world that was falling apart. Tom was not just talking about going into the world to evangelize, he was talking about linking hands with the Savior who came to take over.”

Troubled Times

Following Urbana ’70, Tom Skinner and TSA continued to be a force among evangelicals. But as his public success continued, cracks began to show in Skinner’s private life. By 1971, Skinner’s demanding ministry schedule had taken its toll on his marriage to Vivian Sutton, Skinner’s childhood sweetheart and a former crusade musician. Tom and Vivian had been married since 1963 and had two daughters, Lauren and Kyla. Although the couple initially demonstrated all the signs of a happy family, the rigors of a high-profile ministry proved too much for Skinner to balance with his family life. Separation, and ultimately a divorce, followed when Skinner failed to make the changes necessary to restore his marriage.

While many of his ministry associates were aware of the evangelist’s marital woes, Skinner at first kept the critical condition of his marriage hidden from even his closest friends. “The TSA board knew that the marriage was stormy, but not because Tom had told us,” explains Pannell. “We knew because we were the ones Vivian would call wondering where her husband was.”

“Since I was not as involved in his ministry, I think I was probably more sensitive to the problems,” says Skinner’s ex-wife, Vivian Bartee. “Tom received a lot of fame and prestige at a very young age, and I believe that made it easy for him to turn a deaf ear to a spouse who was telling him that things were not right in his own household. I think he was embarrassed to admit that there was a problem.”

Skinner’s oldest daughter, Lauren Gaines, now 32, remembers spending much time traveling with her dad, especially in the early part of Skinner’s ministry. But with the birth of her younger sister in 1970 and Skinner’s rapidly growing prominence, Lauren soon found herself seeing less and less of her father.

“I remember being about nine years old and being very frustrated about how much he was gone,” she recalls. “But the Lord ministered to me through another child my age who sent me a card and a wooden cross she had made. She sent it to tell me thanks for letting my dad come to where she lived, because she had gotten to know Jesus through my father’s ministry. At that point, when I was probably struggling the most with my father’s absence, I got ministered to by another child my age. And I realized just how important Dad’s work was.”

Despite Skinner’s absences, Gaines insists he never stopped being a good father. “He impressed upon Kyla and me the importance of a relationship with Christ and the necessity of receiving a good education,” says Gaines, who today works with World Impact Ministries in Newark, New Jersey.

For Bartee, now a school teacher in Brooklyn, New York, it is not as easy to overcome Skinner’s shortcomings as a husband and father. “By God’s grace, I was able to forgive Tom,” says Bartee, “and God even ministered to me through Tom’s ministry. But we were never truly friends again.”

As word of Skinner’s marital problems spread, the evangelist saw many other friendships come to an end as well. And, consequently, tsa saw its support from the wider evangelical community dwindle.

“The divorce became the official occasion for white evangelicals to divorce Tom,” contends Potter. “He had long ago become a persona non grata for many white evangelicals who were offended by his critique of white Christianity, but now they had an official reason to desert him.”

At the same time, Skinner had slowly moved away from the team-ministry concept that had originally driven TSA, says Pannell. With more solo ministry opportunities presenting themselves, such as his role as chaplain of the Washington Redskins football team, Skinner became less and less of a team player. “It was a very sensitive area for many of us on the TSA board,” admits Pannell.

And so, with the lingering stigma of Skinner’s failed marriage and an ever-growing wedge between the evangelist and his once close-knit ministry associates, TSA began to unravel.

By 1975, the bottom had fallen out of Skinner’s organization. Coworkers such as Pannell, Ellis, and Greenidge gradually left the organization. And Stan Long, now a pastor and consultant to the American Tract Society, was brought aboard in the hope of salvaging the ailing ministry. But the golden age of Tom Skinner Associates had passed, and Skinner, his ministry a shadow of what it had once been, entered a long period of reevaluation.

New Horizons

The 1980s signaled a new era for Skinner. Having survived several years of rejection and bouts of depression, Skinner’s ministry turned away from an evangelistic emphasis and focused more on Christian leadership training. In addition, Skinner’s ongoing work as chaplain of the Washington Redskins expanded his influence in mainstream celebrity circles.

Most significantly, in 1981, Skinner married Barbara Williams, an attorney and secretary for the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, D.C. With marriage to Barbara came new happiness, and through her connections his ministry began making inroads into the black political elite and traditional black church leadership whom Skinner had once scorned. Powerful figures in the black community such as Jesse Jackson and the late minister Samuel Hines of the Third Street Church of God in Washington, D.C., became his close confidants.

Many friends, like Ellis, believe some of Skinner’s greatest contributions came during this latter phase of his life. “By the time of his death, Tom had had an enormous influence on countless black leaders,” says Ellis. “He had integrated his theology and social activism in such a way that you could clearly see he was making a profound contribution.”

But even reaching a more mainstream audience, Skinner’s central motif of the “kingdom of God” never shifted. “The stories might have changed, but his main theme remained the same,” says Barbara Skinner, who now directs the Skinner Farm Leadership Institute in Tracy’s Landing, Maryland. “He was constantly looking for that body of believers who were the life expression of God’s kingdom.”

Patrick Morley, a white Orlando, Florida, business executive, was deeply affected by Skinner in the latter half of the evangelist’s life. After Skinner delivered seminars to Morley’s company, the two became fast friends. “Tom poured hundreds of hours into discipling me around our dinner table, after tennis, or in a car going somewhere,” Morley told Urban Family. “He never would give up on anyone; [he saw] the potential in everyone, even when others would write you off.”

Skinner and Morley joined together in 1993 to launch Mission Mississippi, a racial-reconciliation ministry based in Jackson. The pair also traveled to Israel together in January 1994, just four months before Skinner’s death. “Tom made some blacks and some whites angry,” says Morley, “but he deeply influenced an entire generation of people to think more deeply about their lives.”

Skinner’s death from leukemia at age 52 was a shock to many. At his funeral, an unusual gallery of individuals from all segments of American society came to pay their respects. The diverse lineup included Jesse Jackson, poet Maya Angelou, Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan-not to mention the countless others with whom Skinner had worked in the heyday of TSA.

“He was a true reconciler,” says Johnnie Skinner about his brother. “Even in his death, he was bringing different people together.”

Today, nearly 26 years after Skinner’s landmark speech at Urbana ’70, there is also a fresh sense of hope and purpose among those young black evangelicals who were inspired by Skinner’s memorable words.

“The real meaning of it is becoming increasingly apparent to me as I continually encounter men and women who have made the choice for ministry in part because of what happened there,” observes Greenidge. “Back then, we wanted to see white evangelicalism make some wholesale changes, but it wasn’t happening. However, out of that movement came people like Tony Evans, Matthew Parker, and many other black leaders who are making a huge impact in today’s church.”

An extended list of those directly or indirectly influenced by Skinner’s ministry reads like a virtual who’s who of what has been called the “new black evangelicalism”: Carl Ellis, Kay Coles James, Crawford Loritts (of Campus Crusade for Christ), Albert Miller, Spencer Perkins (of Urban Family), Ron Potter, and Brenda Salter McNeil (of InterVarsity), to name a few.

Some, like Miller and Potter, have expressed minor disappointment that the full potential of Skinner’s vision was not realized by the evangelist during TSA’s shining years. Contends Potter: “Tom knew how to fire up young blacks, but there was an inability on the part of TSA to flesh out the message. After the Urbana ’70 speech, many of us were looking for leadership on what to do next, but it never happened.”

Still, he says, the finger must point back to those young black evangelicals who were imparted a new vision by a streetwise prophet from Harlem.

“When Tom died, an era came to an end,” Potter concludes. “But that means those of us who have been mentored by Tom now have a responsibility to carry on that vision. We sometimes complain that ‘the Liberator is late.’ Well, he may be late because he’s waiting on us.”

Edward Gilbreath is associate editor of New Man magazine.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Henrietta Mears has been called the “mother of Sunday school.” Her revolutionary teaching methods (adding lively pictures and implementing grade levels) changed the landscape of Christian education in her day, and her imprimatur remains on today’s models for curriculum. But I like to think of her more as the “grandmother” of modern evangelicalism. Her vision for the Christian life inspired a generation of young leaders who, in turn, inspired my generation.

She has the perfect pedigree to be the grandmother of evangelicalism: she accepted Christ consciously, dutifully, and single-mindedly at the age of seven (and never wavered); she sacrificed the (non-Christian) love of her life for the gospel; she had an unquenchable passion for Sunday school; and she wore goofy hats.

But as grandmothers go, she also would have been one who sometimes asserted an opinion where it may not have been solicited; she would have been a source of discomfort to those Christians who could not get to church on time; and she would have raised an eyebrow among those who could not abide her blue dress with butterfly sleeves, red earrings (and bracelet and pin and necklace), bright lipstick, polished nails, and rings on every finger. (“Why not look your best when you go to church on Sunday?”) An apostle to the Jesus freaks she was not.

Still, for the historical moment of her rising, big hats with pinwheels and long-legged birds on them served her well. She used to say: “I wear my hats for my college boys, and they love them.”

She also used to say: “There is no magic in small plans. When I consider my ministry, I think of the world. Anything less than that would not be worthy of Christ nor of his will for my life.” So while inspiring her “college boys” with her hats, she also imparted to them the vision of conquering the world for Christ. And her “boys” included the likes of Campus Crusade’s Bill Bright and former U.S. Senate chaplain, the late Richard Halverson.

Billy Graham’s preaching ministry itself was galvanized at Henrietta Mears’s summer Bible conference center, Forest Home. It was there that Graham came to terms with the authority of Scripture in 1948. Bill Bright was emboldened in 1947 by Mears’s challenge to him and the other members of her “Fellowship of the Burning Heart” to pledge themselves to “absolute consecration” to Jesus Christ and his gospel.

So that makes Henrietta Mears a kind of spiritual grandmother to me. Billy Graham’s preaching galvanized my new-found faith in the summer of 1972. My faith was emboldened the same summer at a youth evangelism event, Explo ’72, sponsored by Bill Bright’s Campus Crusade for Christ. Mears may well be the spiritual grandmother of us all.

Seven-Year-Old Disciple

Henrietta Cornelia Mears was born into the high society of Fargo, North Dakota, in 1890. She was the last of the seven children of Margaret (then 42) and Ashley Mears, who owned several banks in the Dakotas. From the start, she was a precocious child who protested when her mother would “dumb down” Bible readings to make them more understandable. On her first day of kindergarten she returned nonplused, saying that kindergarten was to amuse little children and that she had been “amused enough”; she wanted to be “educated.”

At the age of seven, after the family had resettled in Minneapolis, she convinced her mother that she sincerely felt the weight of her sin and wanted to surrender her life to Christ. Her mother protested, saying, “I’m afraid everyone will think that at seven you are too young to understand what it means.”

The young Henrietta replied, “Why mother, you know how sinful I am!”

Four days later, the following Easter Sunday, she stood with her cousin before the congregation at the First Baptist Church and answered all the questions put to her about Christian doctrine with “clarity and frankness.” (Before she could read she determined that her favorite book of the Bible was Paul’s Letter to the Romans.)

At the age of 12 she was stricken with crippling muscular rheumatism so that “her family feared for her life.” Her parents asked Mr. Ingersoll, a friend and church member, to pray for Henrietta, and when he arrived he asked her if she believed the Lord could heal her. She answered, “He created us. I see no reason why he cannot heal us.”

Ingersoll’s prayers for healing, however, remained unanswered. In fact, her rheumatism became worse. Two years later, in acute pain, she asked her mother if Mr. Ingersoll might come back and pray for her again.

This time when he prayed, as Barbara Powers reports in The Henrietta Mears Story, “Henrietta was filled with confidence that her body had been completely healed.”

A few years later, when she was a senior in high school, Mears and a friend attended a series of meetings at church, and they both “heard the call” to commit their lives to full-time Christian service. When the invitation was given, they went forward with absolute resolve to “go wherever the Lord wanted them to go” and to “do whatever work he wanted them to do.” The friend soon felt called to missionary service in Japan. But Mears heard no such call, and that vexed her: “Is something wrong with me?” she asked herself.

She remained in the States and went on to attend the University of Minnesota, graduating among the top of her class in 1913. She took a teaching position in chemistry at a nearby high school, which planted the love of students in her heart. It was not long before she was teaching the Bible to the school’s football team (they approached her about teaching them).

She fell in love at this stage of her life. When the young man proposed marriage, he assured her that, despite his not being a Christian, he “admired her religious convictions.” She longed for companionship, children, family life, and was not averse to the life that marrying a banker, like her father, would promise. She agonized and prayed: “Lord, you have made me the way I am. I love a home, I love security, I love children, and I love him.” She left it in the Lord’s hands, saying, “You have promised to fulfill all my needs. I trust in you alone.”

In the end, she severed the relationship, saying later, “I’ve never missed companionship.” Her friend and protévé Cornelius says that “it would have been hard for her to find a mate who could live with her” since Mears was so spiritually focused. Besides, adds Cornelius, “she loved the apostle Paul the most.” When Mears’s many students expressed their desire to follow her example in remaining single, she rebuked them: “Nonsense! The Lord intends for you to marry; that is the way he has made us. It just so happens that in my case that wasn’t his will.”

After teaching in public high schools for 14 years, Mears took a year’s sabbatical to travel and assess her goals for the future. During this time she and her sister Margaret traveled to Europe and then wintered in California, attending the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood. The senior pastor, Stewart P. MacLennan, knew Henrietta from having visited her in Minnesota, and he had invited her to speak on several occasions. Before the sisters returned home, he asked Mears to come on staff as the director of Christian education at the church. In 1928, at the age of 38, she joined the staff of “Hollywood Pres.”

A Dream Come True

Mears used to say “dream big,” and she backed up her dreams with one of her favorite Scripture passages: “Every single place that the sole of your foot will tread upon will be yours” (Joshua 1:3)-to which she would add, “We need more Bibles today bound in shoe leather!”

No obstacle was greater than the size of her dreams-which always centered on her work with the youth. When Henrietta Mears became director of Christian education, the Sunday school of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood consisted of 450 people. But within a mere two-and-a-half years, it grew to exceed 4,000. When she was dissatisfied with the “unattractive” (no pictures) and “deficient” (no continuity between lessons) Sunday-school curriculum the church was using, she tossed it and wrote her own (her lessons were soon in such great demand that in 1933 she, along with Cyrus Nelson, founded Gospel Light Publications for the purpose of distributing them nationwide); when she wanted the youth of her Sunday-school program at the church to have a place to enjoy “happy memories and high points of decision,” that dream was translated into the Forest Home Conference Center, which she founded in 1939; when national distribution of Sunday-school material through Gospel Light was not enough, she went international, launching Gospel Light International. (“Ninety percent of failure is because of lack of organization,” she said.)

By 1957, as a result of Henrietta Mears’s years of ministry with Hollywood Pres, the church had erected a large Christian education plant, developed a successful Sunday-school curriculum, and evangelized and discipled tens of thousands of young people.

Mears was driven by her conviction that she was training the next generation of world leaders. And almost incidentally, in the course of so doing, she raised the concept of Sunday school to new levels. “It is my business as a Sunday-school teacher,” she said at a convention held at Moody Church, Chicago, in 1950, “to instill a divine discontent for the ordinary. Only the best possible is good enough for God. Can you say, ‘God, I have done all that I can’?”

“She believed in methods,” says Eva Cornelius, who worked with Gospel Light and traveled with Mears. “She introduced the idea that the youth should be taught at grade levels and that teachers should be well prepared and follow up with their students.” Those Sunday-school teachers who give up and quit, Mears would say, were those who only planned a week at a time and waited until Saturday night to do their preparations. “You must be an architect. It takes time. Plan it for six months or a year-better five years.”

To those who complained that they were not succeeding, Mears rejoined: “You don’t have results because you don’t take the time or make the effort to do anything about your teaching or to learn more about your students.”

“Don’t ever say ‘I’m just a Sunday-school teacher,’ ” she used to say. “You are a teacher in Christ’s college. Be proud that you teach!”

She never faulted youth who didn’t attend church. She insisted that it was incumbent upon the church to draw the kids in. “These kids don’t have time to waste. There are so many things they can do to have a good time,” she said. “Everything we offer youth must be excellent. Their association with the gospel must be of the very finest in every way.” The church, she said, must “enlist and train” leadership within its own members. “Something was wrong,” she said, if churches weren’t doing this.

But she didn’t cut any slack for the students either. During a “share time” at a Wednesday evening Bible study, she “took command” when she thought the discussion had gotten off track: “That has been the most ridiculous testimony time I think I have ever heard! All we have been talking about is silly little things that don’t amount to a hill of beans,” she said. “There hasn’t been one word about winning the nations for Christ.”

“She had little patience for people who trivialized the gospel,” says Bill Greig, CEO of Gospel Light and the son of Mears’s cousin. “She wasn’t afraid to speak as she felt led of the Lord to speak. She demanded excellence from people.”

Though Mears frequently taught and spoke from pulpits all over the country, she never assumed that a woman should preach-hence the emphasis on training “her boys.” “She thought that if you got the men there,” says Cornelius, “the women could come too.” Bill Bright adds: “She felt that both men and women could be taught under men, but that some men would have trouble being taught under a woman. Yet she herself appealed to men. So she contradicted her own principle.”

But she had a vision for what anybody, male or female, could be in Christ. Vonette Bright, who (with her husband, Bill) lived with Mears for ten years running her home and counted her among her closest companions, said that when Henrietta Mears taught from the Bible she always took the lesson to the point of personal application: “She endeavored to make a person come to the point of commitment. She would ask, ‘What are you going to do with this information?’ “

Eva Cornelius recalls, “She would look at somebody and have a dream about what he or she could become, and then encourage and pray for them. I used to tell her, ‘Henrietta, stop looking at me! I have too much to do already!’ “

The late Bible scholar Wilbur M. Smith said that Henrietta Mears’s accomplishments at Hollywood Presbyterian amounted to “the most significant work among our nation’s youth done by a woman in the twentieth century.” Greig adds that he is still hearing Mears’s messages from the pulpits of her disciples today.

Henrietta Mears’s example stood up to her proclamation: There is no magic in small plans.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

“I love pregnant brevity, and some of my material is, I know, packed tight (Packer by name, packer by nature).” So says James Innell Packer about his writing style, to which he adds this apology: “I ask my reader’s pardon if they find obscurity due to my over-indulging this love of mine" (God’s Word: Studies of Key Bible Themes, 1981).

He need not worry. Packer’s ability to address immensely important subjects in crisp, succinct sentences is one of the reasons why, as both author and speaker, he has played such an important role among American evangelicals for four decades.

It is not easy to assess the exact nature of his impact on American evangelicals or the reasons for it. For one thing, Packer has never lived in the United States. Since 1958, his books and essays have been widely read in the States, and he has traveled extensively to address American audiences; yet his activity has proceeded from outside the United States-first from a variety of posts in England, and since 1979 from his position as professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Further, his wide-ranging labor has aimed directly at the shadowy intersection between popular and academic concerns. He is a scholar who found his vocation in popular communication, a popular communicator who never abandoned scholarship.

Complex as it is to assess the impact of this multi-gifted contemporary, the effort is worthwhile. Learning about him may assist us in learning something about ourselves. And making such an effort may even illuminate the cause of Christian truth to which Packer has devoted his adult life.

The making of the wordsmith

J. I. Packer was born in Gloucestershire, England, 70 years ago this past July. At Oxford University he earned B.A. degrees in the classics and theology and a D.Phil. in theology. Important as Oxford was for him academically, it was even more important for his faith: here he fully encountered the Christian gospel and was converted; and from Oxford he set out on his life’s course as an interpreter of Scripture and a promoter of classical evangelical theology.

The link between Packer the scholar and Packer the young Christian was his fascination with the Puritans. The Puritans provided for him a subject for doctoral studies, a model for Christian life, and (many years later) the subject matter for one of his most important books, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life (1990).

After graduate studies at Oxford, Packer filled a number of posts at Tyndale Hall and College (Bristol) and Latimer House (Oxford), both institutions associated with the evangelical wing of the Church of England. In 1979 he moved to Canada as a professor of theology at Regent College (Vancouver). By that time, however, he was established as a widely read author, and he had already embarked on a far-flung ministry that had taken him to Australia, New Zealand, and many points in North America.

The packing of words

Packer’s reputation, early and late, has rested on an ability to penetrate contested issues lying at the heart of Christian faith, and to do so with clarity, profundity, charity, and the benefits of historical learning. The book that first won him a hearing in the United States was ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God: Some Evangelical Principles (1958), which he published in the wake of controversy over Billy Graham’s landmark visit to Great Britain in 1955. His conclusion for this substantial but pithy volume marked out a path from which he has never deviated. Packer recognized merit in criticism of evangelicalism, but he did not waver from expressing clear, evangelical convictions: “We must keep before us the real issues in this debate … the authority of Christ and of Scripture; the relation between the Bible and reason; the method of theology, and the meaning of repentance; the choice between Evangelicalism and Subjectivism.”

In the steady stream of books and articles that followed, the one with the broadest impact had the most compact title. Knowing God (1973) began with a memorable first line: “As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a treatise on God.” Packer hastened to say that “this book, however, is not it,” and was “at best a string of beads: a series of small studies of great subjects.” Yet Knowing God has served an immense throng of readers as a compelling account of God’s character, purpose, and intentions. So too has it encouraged believers to live under the reality of God’s supernal goodness.

As of early 1995, Packer’s publications included 165 separate books, pamphlets, and articles in books, plus nearly that many more journal or periodical articles. About 65 of the books and pamphlets were published only in the United Kingdom, slightly more than those published only in the U.S.

The major books are well known in both the U.K. and the U.S.: ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (1958), Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (1961), Knowing God (1973), A Quest for Godliness (U.S.) or Among God’s Giants (U.K.) (1991). Beyond these titles a pattern emerges. Someone who wants to read all of Packer’s writings on the Puritans, or on sacraments, church order, and historical confessions should do so from a British library strong in contemporary Anglican writing. By contrast, someone who wishes to explore Packer's convictions on the gifts of the Spirit, the use of the Bible, or the meaning of justification by faith should pursue those inquiries in a North American library strong in materials from evangelical, interdenominational publishers.

One measure of Packer’s influence is the number of his books sold. Counting just 18 different titles from five American publishers—Crossway, Eerdmans, Harold Shaw, InterVarsity Press, and Tyndale House—came to sales of slightly more than one and three-quarter million by the middle of 1995. Knowing God (IVP) accounted for over half that total; over 200,000 copies of Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (IVP) have been distributed since its release in 1961; two IVP pamphlets, Meeting God and Finding God’s Will, had both topped the 100,000 figure; and ‘Fundamentalism’ and the Word of God (Eerdmans) and I Want to Be a Christian (Tyndale) have gone over the 50,000 mark.

That is a lot of books. Yet the figures are not as impressive as the numbers sold by some of Packer’s publishing contemporaries like Hal Lindsey, Frank Peretti, or Marjorie Holmes. What is notable about the sale of Packer’s books is that they combine very solid sales for volumes on practical spirituality and on sturdy theological topics.

The peripatetic Packer

Remarkably, Packer has been able to maintain a brutal travel and guest lecture schedule while still writing steadily, supporting many theological and practical parachurch agencies, teaching at Regent, and participating in the parish life of Saint John’s (Shaughnessy) Anglican Church in Vancouver (where he is an honorary assistant rector).

Besides his work at Regent, he has also served stints as a visiting lecturer at eight seminaries in the United States and Canada. The collective identity of these institutions is strikingly different from the British institutions where Packer was employed before migrating to North America. The British posts were Anglican, the North American posts have been Reformed, evangelical, or evangelical and Reformed.

Packer has also actively supported several other enterprises in the American evangelical world. He has not only written frequently for, but consulted regularly with, Christianity Today and its sister publications. He has served several terms on the board of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies. He also has played an important part in many collaborative book projects. So it was that Packer made special contributions to several of Carl Henry’s memorable evangelical symposia in the 1950s and 1960s, to several books on biblical inerrancy from the 1970s and 1980s, and to several general collections on theology and spirituality in the 1980s and 1990s.

Many of Packer’s contributions to these institutional and collaborative projects feature his characteristic concentrations on churchly, historical, and confessional matters. But, with the exception of a few of the specifically Reformed enterprises, very few of the forums themselves can be said to be overwhelmingly historical, confessional, or churchly in their intents. Packer's identity as an Anglican has not loomed large in his North American career, where assistance to the Anglican Church of Canada and the American Episcopal Church has not been nearly as visible as his contributions to trans-denominational evangelicalism.

Packer the practical theologian

As a thinker and theologian, Packer has offered American evangelicals exactly what they have needed. American evangelicalism can be best defined by its traditional activistic pietism (or “experiential biblicism”). It has been profoundly marked by an eager ability to mobilize for specific, tangible tasks like evangelism, institution building, and political action (sometimes for ill, but often for good). The other side of this activism has been an underemphasis on the historical, contemplative, mediating, and complex expressions of the faith. If that analysis is correct, Packer’s influence on American evangelicalism has been as critical as it is broad.

Packer embodies the distilled wisdom of the ecclesiastical ages, but he has not scrupled to fellowship with those whose churches were founded yesterday.

Packer has exerted that influence by combining characteristics rarely joined in America: he is an educated, Reformed, Anglican evangelical, with each of the four ascriptions vital as a counterweight to the other three. As the history of Christianity in America has shown so often, any of these commitments by itself can easily become a threat to clarity of Christian thought and integrity of Christian activity. Together, at least as embodied in Packer's writing and speaking, they are water for a parched and weary landscape.

As a well-educated person grounded in both classical theology and the classics more generally, Packer readily perceives how complex many spiritual and intellectual problems really are. He has assumed that he has something to learn from authorities beyond his own inner circle. And he instinctively realizes that the canons of various academic disciplines have intrinsic value, but also that perceptive canon-criticism is a requirement for self-critical wisdom. At the same time, he has displayed these scholarly virtues as a part of, rather than in revolt against, his Reformed, Anglican, and evangelical identities. He has shown how learning can not only flourish with Reformed, Anglican, and evangelical convictions, but can flourish to honor God and build up the church.

As a Calvinist, Packer has embodied the virtues of a weighty theological tradition. He has demonstrated the profundity to be found in embracing one of the three or four truly consequential theological traditions in the Christian history of the last several centuries. His self-conscious Reformed theology has been displayed to best advantage in his explicitly biblical work-as careful exegete, resolute defender of the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, and self-conscious hermeneutical theorist. Against the widely prevailing, but intellectually suicidal, American tendency to act as if exegesis, hermeneutics, and dogmatizing on the doctrine of Scripture take place in a vacuum, Packer has offered the principled thinking of a sturdy Calvinist.

By comparison with American theologians, Packer most resembles B. B. Warfield, the great Princeton exegete, polemicist, and historically informed theologian who was active from the 1870s to the early 1920s. Like Warfield, Packer has sustained organic connections between a high doctrine of the Bible, careful methods of exegesis, and Reformed exegetical conclusions. And yet Packer the Calvinist has been simultaneously Packer the evangelical and Packer the Anglican, with each of the latter commitments taking the self-satisfied, triumphalist, and intellectualist edges off the spirit that so often has characterized Calvinism in America. (I can say these things about American Calvinists because I am one of them myself.)

As an Anglican, Packer is moderate and orthodox in the classical sense of holding to the great Trinitarian creeds. He is self-critical and historical and is open to theological insight from other points on the ecclesiastical compass (including the Roman Catholic and the Pentecostal). There are Episcopalians or Anglicans in the United States and Canada who share these virtues, but none (to my knowledge) who do so along with such obvious commitments to Reformed and evangelical convictions. He embodies the distilled wisdom of the ecclesiastical ages, but he has not scrupled to fellowship with those whose churches were founded yesterday.

Finally, in all things, Packer is an evangelical. He knows, teaches, and lives the truth that knowledge of God must be personal, that the work of Christ was a ransom to be actively embraced, and that the Holy Spirit is alive and active even today. At the end of Knowing God, Packer’s evangelical convictions blend seamlessly with his recommendation of classical orthodoxy. Besides knowing what the Scriptures say about God, besides knowing that humans are sinners in need of divine grace, “we saw that knowing God involves a personal relationship whereby you give yourself to God on the basis of His promise to give Himself to you. Knowing God means asking His mercy, and resting on His undertaking to forgive sinners for Jesus’s sake. Further, it means becoming a disciple of Jesus, the living Saviour who is ‘there’ today, calling the needy to Himself as He did in Galilee in the days of His flesh. Knowing God, in other words, involves faith-assent, consent, commitment-and faith expresses itself in prayer and obedience.”

The diction is British, the sentiment is evangelical. The unusual quality of Packer’s evangelicalism, however, is precisely that it is so organically linked to his education, his Calvinism, and his Anglicanism. This combination keeps it from the excesses that a largely un-historical, mostly antitraditional, and often anti-intellectual evangelicalism has suffered in American history.

If the full extent of Packer’s influence cannot yet be adequately judged, the outlines of that influence are clear. The influence has been considerable, in part because of the gifts, wisdom, and innate abilities Packer has brought to the task. However, Packer has had a considerable influence because he has written and said what American evangelicals have needed to hear, not least about the holiness, goodness, mercy, and love of God.

Mark A. Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. This article was adapted from Noll’s contribution to Doing Theology for the People of God: Studies in Honor of J. I. Packer, edited by Donald Lewis and Alistair McGrath (InterVarsity Press, 1996).

John Stott turned 75 this year. He passed this milestone with his integrity unscratched, his vigor seemingly undiminished, his mind as luminous as ever, and his ministry still touching the far corners of the world. Not all reach this milestone; very few reach it with such honor; and fewer yet view their accomplishments with the humility of a John Stott.

Stott has been called “the most influential clergyman in the Church of England during the twentieth century” (David Edwards), and he has been one of the most prominent evangelical leaders of our time, too. As an evangelical leader, he views the world as a pastor. He has been preeminently a steward of God’s truth and a herald of the biblical message. The leadership he has given has flowed out of his pastoral and biblical perspectives.

Local pastor, global leader

Today, pastors average between two and three years in their churches; Stott has just passed his fiftieth year of ministry at All Souls Langham Place in London, the only church he has served.

Stott’s ministry at All Souls was marked by his conscientious, systematic preaching of the Word of God. “Every authentic ministry begins … with the conviction that we have been called to handle God’s Word as its guardians and heralds,” he wrote in his commentary on Thessalonians. “Our task is to keep it, study it, expound it, apply it, and obey it.” And so he has.

But preaching the truth of God’s Word in the Anglican world has not been easy. In the years immediately following World War II, evangelicals were considered a sectarian “party” and were not well positioned to reform the Church of England. Evangelicals were within Anglicanism ecclesiastically, but they kept themselves apart from its inner workings because of their theological convictions. That separation, Stott believed, was the major obstacle to effective engagement with the church’s theology and practice.

Stott sought to change evangelical separatism through sponsoring two National Evangelical Anglican Congresses (1967 and 1977). The first congress, whose theme was the church (its nature, mission, and message), successfully re-engaged evangelicals with the Anglican church, signaling their intent to be loyal members. Evangelicals went into the first congress thinking of themselves as evangelicals who happened to be Anglican, but by the second congress a decade later, they had become Anglicans who just happened to be evangelical.

This success has not been without its ambiguities. Whereas a growing number of evangelicals have been appointed to bishoprics, evangelical identity today is hazier than it used to be. Was this inevitable if evangelicals were to become loyal Anglicans? Could this have been avoided if evangelical substance and passion had not declined? These are not insignificant questions. Evangelicals in American mainline denominations ponder the same dilemma: What are the benefits and costs of staying in, and what price should be paid for which gain?

Stott has played a large role, too, in the remarkable international growth of evangelicalism since World War II. The high-water mark in this resurgence of biblical Christianity was the Lausanne Covenant, the outcome of the International Congress on World Evangelization in 1974. Attended by representatives from 150 nations, the congress was described by Time magazine as “possibly the most wide-ranging meeting of Christians ever held.” Stott was the principal drafter of the covenant, which was both a theological declaration and a summons to evangelism and social responsibility. The importance of the Lausanne Covenant remains undiminished for its evangelical cohesion, vision, and conviction, and no small part of this remarkable moment belonged to Stott.

From All Souls, Stott has also extended his ministry into the Third World where, in spite of his own privileged upbringing, he has been able to cross national and cultural divides to identify with the needs and suffering of those who are forgotten by the First World. Today, through the Langham Foundation, which Stott created, two main ministries are undertaken-pastoral training and book distribution.

Stott believes that churches rarely rise above their pastors, and that those who train pastors have a significant place in the life of the church. Consequently, Stott works with indigenous churches to identify leaders whose character and leadership are widely recognized and whose teaching ministry would be enlarged through doctoral work. This past year, 17 doctoral students from 14 countries were being supported, mainly in British universities, in addition to the 12 who graduated during the year. This support is costly-between $22,000 and $28,000 per student per year-but Vinay Samuel, of the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, says that this program “has already produced scholars who are having an influence on their generation throughout the world.” Stott also established the Evangelical Literature Trust to distribute books to Third World pastors and seminaries.

In all Stott’s ministries, he has been known as a reformer. “We need to get the failures of the church on our conscience,” he says. Nothing today is more urgent, he declares, than that the church begin to exhibit its reality as the dwelling place of God and as the new humanity being built in Christ. Only then will there be a credible witness to Christ.

The making of many books

Stott’s literary output is remarkable for both its quantity and its sustained quality. He is the author of 42 books, the editor of 14, and he has written about 500 chapters, essays, articles, and booklets. So prolific has he been that for many years, at least in America, the image of InterVarsity Press, which carried most of his books, was subsumed under his own image. In everything he has written, Stott has always been stringently biblical, charitable but principled, often creative and courageous, his thought expressed in prose both crisp and lucid.His books fall into two main categories: those about the biblical Word and those that engage the world from a biblical perspective. The category of the Word breaks down into three subcategories. First, there are books on or about the Bible, such as his Basic Introduction to the New Testament and commentaries on numerous books of the Bible. Also included are biblical studies on doctrinal themes such as The Baptism and Fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Second, there is his lifelong preoccupation with Christ. Christ the Controversialist argues that Jesus not only faced many of the debates that trouble the church today, but that he insisted on a doctrinally shaped answer to them. In The Cross of Christ, on the Atonement, one probably hears Stott’s heartbeat more loudly than any other. Basic Christianity, which has sold about a million copies and is translated into more than 50 languages, explains the gospel message. Finally, there are books on preaching, Preacher’s Portrait and Between Two Worlds.

In the category of the world is his seminal Christian Mission in the Modern World, which argued that evangelism must be done out of a Christian sense of responsibility for the whole person. Involvement is a two-volume study on some of our most perplexing ethical dilemmas.

His writing has a striking candor about it, as reflected in how he consistently approaches Scripture. “We have to open our minds wide to risk hearing what we do not want to hear,” he says. Because we too often come to Scripture for comfort, “we tend to come to it with our minds made up, anxious to hear only the reassuring echoes of our own prejudice.” Stott’s expositions jolt us out of our complacent comfort zones.

Stott, the noncontroversialist

Stott’s kind of evangelicalism is profoundly biblical, thoughtful, full of conviction, and it goes hand in hand with a piety marked by self-discipline, self-sacrifice, and self-forgetfulness. Stott’s Balanced Christianity is, in brief compass, a declaration of this kind of evangelicalism. In it he opposes a polarization between mind and emotions that is so common today; he calls the church to be both conservative on the nature of Scripture and radical in working out its truths in culture; he asks for acceptance of what is both structured and unstructured in the life of the church; and he calls for a partnership between evangelism and social responsibility.

It is the first of these polarizations, however, that is especially pertinent. Stott opposes preaching that is without biblical substance, faith without the apostolic willingness to reason about it, and in the contemporary hunger for emotional experiences, he opposes “the enthronement of experience as the criterion of truth, whereas truth should be the criterion of experience.” Evangelical faith ceases to be evangelical when it ceases to concern itself with the truth of Scripture.

Worship is impossible without biblical preaching. “Word and worship belong indissolubly together,” he says in Between Two Worlds. “All worship is an intelligent and loving response to the revelation of God, because it is an adoration of his Name. Therefore, acceptable worship is impossible without preaching. For preaching is making known the Name of the Lord, and worship is praising the Name of the Lord made known.” He observes that the poverty of our worship today reflects a poverty in our knowledge of God, and this is a poverty in our knowledge of Scripture.

In drafting the Lausanne Covenant, Stott resisted the temptation to reduce evangelism to technique and the gospel to therapy. The covenant first lays a foundation: God is the one “who governs all things according to his will” and “who has been calling out from the world a people for himself”; the Scriptures are truthful and authoritative “in their entirety as the only written Word of God”; and Christ is the “only one Savior and only one Gospel.” These convictions explain what evangelism is-spreading “the good news that Jesus Christ died for our sins and was raised from the dead according to the scriptures, and that as the reigning Lord he now offers the forgiveness of sins and the liberating gift of the spirit to all who repent and believe.”

According to the covenant, the nature of God explains why social concern is not an alternative to the gospel; the God who calls people to a saving faith is also the creator and judge of all. Therefore, we “should share his concern for justice and reconciliation throughout human society and for the liberation of men from every kind of oppression.”

For someone whose convictions are as clear as Stott’s and whose mind is as decisive, he has been embroiled in very few controversies. Stott, in fact, has been able to do consistently what so often eludes us: he speaks the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). Without love, truth can be ugly; and without truth, love can be empty and sentimental.

This union of love and truth was clear in his exchanges with David Edwards, his liberal interlocutor in Evangelical Essentials. Without yielding an inch, Stott modeled how to speak to a theological adversary, one who asked some nettlesome questions. And it was modeled in All Souls when his own convictions on the Holy Spirit’s baptism were challenged by the intrusion of charismatic experience in the church. Especially in the early days of the charismatic movement, this kind of situation frequently divided churches. In All Souls, it did not, and much of the credit belongs to Stott, who held together both theological conviction and pastoral charity.

Stott, the controversialist

He has, however, been involved in some controversy. Aside from Anglican church politics, there have been three such matters that stand out. First, Stott has counseled against separating from theologically defective denominations. In October 1966, however, Martin Lloyd-Jones addressed the National Assembly of Evangelicals in London and argued for such separation. Stott, who happened to be chairing the meeting, politely but forcefully rebuked him. That event, remembered today in England as if it had happened only last week, marked the beginning of a rift between Anglican and non-Anglican evangelicals, a rift that, in many ways, has not been overcome as each side simply went its own way. And yet to the end, Stott remained in fellowship with Lloyd-Jones and admired his ministry greatly.

Second, Stott opposed the charismatic understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Michael Harper, who became prominent in the charismatic movement in England, was a curate in All Souls when he first experienced the Spirit’s renewal. And it was from within All Souls that Harper began to advocate his new understanding. Stott’s response came in an address at a clerical conference and was later published as The Baptism and Fullness of the Holy Spirit. Although he subsequently modified the way he stated his position, he did not change his mind on this matter. He did, however, bend over backwards to accommodate charismatic concerns that he believed were biblically valid.

Third, in his debate with David Edwards, Stott was asked what he believed about the fate of those who die outside of Christ. He elaborated briefly on a view that he had, in fact, held for many years. The wicked, he thought, would be annihilated. His proposal, by his own reckoning, was outside the parameters of historic Christian thought, and in the United States in particular it caused much consternation. Since then Stott has focused on qualifiers: initially, he said that he held the view “tentatively,” more recently that he remains “agnostic” about it. But most of his critics have focused on what he said he believes, and his statement is rather clear.

Despite these disputes, Stott’s reputation remains intact. One symbol is that in 1983 the archbishop of Canterbury, who has parliamentary power to confer degrees, awarded Stott a doctor of divinity degree from Oxford University in recognition of his extraordinary leadership in the church. It was an honor that Stott has earned.

He has been a visionary who has seen what others cannot see and a leader who has known how to get there. But such are the qualities of integrity, love, and wisdom that one finds in him that his leadership has always rested lightly on those around him. He has always valued being balanced, and he himself has exhibited a balance that is unusual and rare today: truth is accompanied by love, thought by action, the gospel by social responsibility, care for the church by a caring spirit for the world, boldness in belief by humility in spirit, passion for what is true and right by restraint, clarity of thought by sensitivity to others. His ministry has been a gift to the church, for which we should be grateful to God.

David F. Wells is Andrew Mutch Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.