24. Worldwide Christian Outreach: The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church. The setting, Plains, Georgia. The lesson, Queen Esther. The teacher, former President Jimmy Carter. This church was one of the many churches I visited while researching my book Left Behind in a Mega-church World. Some were tiny chapels, others the size of stadiums.

I also visited churches beyond the shores of North America in travels that took me to England and Scotland and several countries on the Continent. Whether in Italy, the Netherlands, or Russia, as so many others have said, the once-vibrant Christian faith is in serious decline.

In some areas of the world Christianity has barely gained a foothold after generations of mission work. My time in Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan confirmed that very fact, though I found some Methodist churches in Singapore that were flourishing. In Africa the exploding faith is still passionate, though sometimes, in the words of my Kenyan students, a mile wide and an inch deep.

I found the faith most fervent in Korea. Hosted by friend and former student Chung Ki Jun, a professor at a Korean Presbyterian seminary, I preached and he interpreted. Most Korean churches are offshoots of American denominations: Methodist, Presbyterian, Assemblies of God. This visit, however, was sponsored by University Bible Fellowship, an authentic Korean Christian movement that has expanded worldwide.

My last speaking venue was at Bethesda Christian University, founded by David Yonggi Cho, pastor of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest church in the world. Here, in a country where Christianity did not even gain a foothold until the end of the nineteenth century, the faith is vibrant, churches are expanding, and missionaries are carrying the gospel around the globe.

What would the great apostle Paul have thought had he known his message would one day virtually die out in the cities and towns along the dusty roads of his missionary journeys while finding root in distant unknown lands? From Plains to Seoul, his message of “victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” rings out, though ever balanced by “take heed, lest you fall.”

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.

JACQUES BARZUN, CLIO AND THE DOCTORS

The history of Christianity is not always the river glorious of God’s perfect peace, in the words of a familiar hymn. This river of faith is full of debris, live and dead, invisible substances stolen from distant soils. From its source in Palestine two thousand years ago, it mingles many waters from distant lands, some destined for resurrection.

Twentieth-century Christianity is far more diverse than was the faith in the first century and in the generations since. The New Testament writings open themselves to different interpretations, and in the ensuing centuries these differences in doctrine and practice have multiplied. Today the differences are so vast that some might wonder if certain variations even belong to the same religion. But despite the differences in doctrine and practice that have arisen across centuries and cultures, core beliefs hold Christians together. Commonalities are greater than differences as is seen in the lives and ministries of C. S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, and Billy Graham.

World Christianity of the past half century—Catholic and Protestant—is largely the product of mission and evangelism, often performed at great sacrifice to the most remote corners of the earth. Before quinine was available as a cure for malaria in the early twentieth century, a majority of missionaries died soon after arriving in Africa. Disease continued to be an obstacle throughout the twentieth century, as was opposition from native peoples, totalitarian governments, and terrorism. Yet the faith took root, perpetuated by indigenous evangelists who gave the gospel cultural context.

The big business of revivalism (following the era of Sunday and McPherson) was carried on by Billy Graham and others in the middle years of the twentieth century. Among them was Oral Roberts, the leading Pentecostal of his day, who conducted large campaigns and later branched into radio and television. Known for his healing ministry, Roberts founded a university and a medical center, both of which were later plagued by widely publicized financial losses and corrupt management. His contemporaries included Rex Humbard, A. A. Allen, and Billy James Hargis, the latter brought down by a shocking series of sordid affairs involving male and female students at his own school.

PARADE OF HISTORY

As church history marches into the twenty-first century, we find Billy Graham on the final night of his final crusade, March 12, 2006, leading a parade of sixteen thousand followers from the vast New Orleans Arena to Bourbon Street to claim the infamous French Quarter for Christ. Riding a motor scooter, Graham serves as grand marshal, as Christians lift their voices singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” What a fitting climax to one man’s career and to a two-thousand-year parade of history! Problem is, the story is an Internet hoax. It is a reminder that even sacred history includes lies and urban legends.

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of television evangelism, scandal continued to plague the industry as both Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart were caught in extramarital affairs. Financial improprieties also brought disgrace. But televangelism did not spell the end of the traveling revivalist. Argentinean Luis Palau took his campaigns worldwide, following in the preaching tradition of Billy Graham. At the same time, German-born Reinhard Bonnke conducted campaigns in Africa and around the world featuring healing miracles. The most spectacular was in 2001, when he reportedly raised Nigerian Pastor Daniel Ekechukwu from the dead.

With severely limited funding, mission agencies were less vulnerable to the scandals that plagued televangelists. Their flaws and failings related more specifically to the area of strategy. Task-oriented North Americans often came with a ready-made agenda and were frustrated when local Christians did not rise to the occasion. Americans in particular offered grand schemes. Japan could be evangelized, Charles and Lettie Cowman promised, by turning their mission house into a military headquarters, utilizing military maps to plot out neighborhoods, and distributing mountains of literature—all to execute their “Every Creature Crusade.”

Some mission agencies were highly specialized. William Cameron Townsend founded Wycliffe Bible Translators to make Scripture available in every language. Donald McGavern presented the Homogeneous Unit Principle (HUP) as the way to bring the gospel to individual people groups. Ralph Winter, founder of the US Center for World Mission, turned the mission focus to “Unreached Peoples.” Among these unreached were Muslims, a vast population that became a major target of mission outreach, with much wrangling over the most effective method of approach. Intertwined with the wide-ranging mission strategies were the third wave (following the first wave of Pentecostalism and the second wave of the charismatic movement), so labeled by C. Peter Wagner, and its accompanying spiritual warfare (namely, warfare against demonic powers of darkness that purportedly hindered the receptivity of the gospel).

RETIRED BISHOP REDIRECTS MISSION OUTREACH

After serving for thirty-five years in India, Anglican Bishop Lesslie Newbigin retired in Birmingham, England, only to realize he had returned to a mission field more irreligious than the one he had left. Evangelism was “much harder than anything I met in India,” he wrote. “There is a cold contempt for the Gospel which is harder to face than opposition.” He quickly became convinced that the “pagan” West “is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.” His retirement years became the most influential of his life as he engaged in evangelism and in writing—particularly Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel in Western Culture. Birmingham became his mission field. “As I visited the Asian homes in the district, most of them Sikhs or Hindus,” he later recalled, “I found a welcome which was often denied on the doorsteps of the natives”—referring to his own countrymen. In his last addresses before a conference of the World Council of Churches, he challenged the notion that “the sins of the old missionaries” are only redressed by giving of ourselves and making no exclusive claims for Jesus. “I am an old missionary, and I have committed most of those sins,” he confessed, but it would be wrong to respond by saying, “I will refrain from talking about Jesus and will instead offer my own life as a witness that will enable people to believe.”

In the midst of these developments a trend emerged, emphasizing not missionaries per se, but the “missional church.” Spurred by the writings and teachings of Anglican Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, scholars and practitioners insisted that mission outreach was most effectively conducted through the local church. Another Anglican cleric who profoundly influenced the worldwide church was John Stott (author of dozens of books, including Basic Christianity and The Cross of Christ), who became deeply involved in furthering theological training of non-Western Christians. John Perkins focused on community development in Jackson, Mississippi, establishing Voice of Calvary Ministries, a multifocused program that has been the inspiration for dozens of other urban ministries

Years before Newbigin began redirecting his energies to evangelizing the West, parachurch organizations, many of them originating in North America, were evangelizing universities and expanding around the world. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Young Life, and Campus Crusade for Christ all sought to evangelize youth and commission them as lay evangelists in the campus and workplace. While Bill Bright expanded Campus Crusade worldwide from his American base, Francis and Edith Schaeffer sought to reach the youth culture from L’Abri, their mountain compound in Switzerland. Their outreach was focused particularly on disillusioned university students who often found atheism more tenable than Christianity.

Idolized as a pop theologian, Schaeffer, a fundamentalist Presbyterian, influenced a generation of Christian leaders, as did Harold Ockenga and Carl F. H. Henry, both theologians and founding editors of Christianity Today. Starting out as a big city soap-box preacher, Henry soon found his calling in the more subdued environments of teaching, editing, and writing. Ockenga introduced “neo-evangelicalism,” much to the chagrin of Carl McIntire and other fundamentalists.

J. I. Packer, a leading North American theologian, had a profound influence on Christians beyond his own Anglican circles. A Canadian of British birth, he was a professor at Regent College for many years and the author of dozens of books, including his seminal work, Knowing God. From Germany, through the teaching and writing of Jürgen Moltmann came theology of hope, an effort to combine an ecumenical, evangelical, and liberation spirit under the banner of an all-inclusive biblical theology. Also focused on a biblical theology approach was the British New Testament scholar Bishop ?. T. Wright.

From Africa came a wide variety of biblical and theological perspectives, including that of Kwame Bediako from Ghana, who drew on the church fathers in his contextualization of African theology. Also contributing important theological insights were scholars from Korea, where Minjung theology (an Asian liberation theology) found root. From Canada came the controversial “open theism,” presented in introductory form by Clark Pinnock in The Openness of God and later fleshed out by American theologian John Sanders and others. A more liberal version of this theology, process theology, had been introduced earlier in the century by Alfred North Whitehead. This theology essentially argued that God is a verb rather than a noun; God is ever in process even as the universe is in process. At the same time, liberal theology was flourishing under Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin, both ministers at New York’s prestigious Riverside Church. From the same pulpit, Norman Vincent Peale gained wide acclaim through his book The Power of Positive Thinking, even as the influence of liberalism was on the decline.

EVERYDAY LIFE

Christianity Online

Google the word Christianity and you might get 89 million results (or only 74 million, depending on the date). Christianity online is big business. Every denomination and most churches have sites, as do mission organizations, magazines, and Christian schools. Angels are featured prominently (132 million results), compared to demons (only 55 million). Apologetics—defending the faith and arguing with atheists—is a major online ministry. Atheism, both for and against, is also a huge online category.

One of the largest sites featuring a wide range of religious resources is belief.net. Billed as a site that offers “Inspiration, Spirituality, Faith, and Religion,” it promotes not only Christianity but also a daily horoscope. Blogs are a prominent aspect of this site, including Michele McGinty’s “Reformed Chicks Blabbing” and Scot McKnight’s “Jesus Creed.” On the opposite spectrum of belief.net is “ExChristian.net” (including ExChristian.net/Face-book) and similar sites that tell the stories of people who have walked away from the faith.

People long dead also have their sites. “Into the Wardrobe” is a C. S. Lewis site hosted by Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Graham. The C. S. Lewis Foundation hosts another major site, as does the C. S. Lewis Institute. “Mother Teresa of Calcutta Center” is her official site, but there is also an official site for her “Cause of Canonization.” The Vatican site invites the browser to enter in one of eight languages. John Calvin pops up primarily in English and has no apparent official site, but his name is referenced in millions of sites and his Institutes of the Christian Religion is online, free for the taking. Church history sites abound, including ones like “Medieval Sourcebook” that offer original documents that can be cut and pasted and emailed in a matter of moments to the research historian’s hundred closest friends.

“Emergent Village” features Brian McLaren podcasts and other resources for those interested in the Emergent Church. “CBE International” is the official website for Christians for Biblical Equality, offering a wide variety of materials. “The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” offers a similar range of materials from the opposite perspective.

THE HOLY OBSERVER

“The Holy Observer” bills itself as being “God’s #1 Source for Christian News.” Among its mix of clever and lame humor is a full-color advertisement sponsored by “Joel Osteen’s Blessed Whitestrips.” He is pictured with his usual toothy smile and a subscript: “If your soul is white as snow, why shouldn’t your teeth be?” A May 2009 lead article is titled, “How big is your PRAYER FOOTPRINT?” with short subtitles and text:

Church Leaders Urge Christians to Reduce Their Prayer Footprints:

Experts warn of a looming shortage of “supernatural resources.”

Jews for Jesus, founded by Moishe Rosen, hosts a flashy interactive site filled with resources and ministry opportunities, while their opponents host a multiplicity of sites challenging their activities and beliefs. Clicking the Jews for Jesus tab “Get Saved” takes the Internet surfer through a series of four steps, each with Bible verses and questions, ending with the “sinner’s prayer.” That step leaves another click that asks for contact information.

“Pulpit Jokes” and “Church Bulletin Bloopers” and sermon humor sites abound, as do Christian cartoon sites such as “ReverendFun” and “The Back Pew.” “The Jolly Blogger” is a personal site hosted by David Wayne that offers not only humor but also poignant accounts of struggling with cancer and other issues. He is a Presbyterian minister whose online bio reads: “I’m a Christian, husband, father, pastor and all around goof who believes that God is at His best when man is at his worst.” Greg Albrecht is one of many online preachers. His website church, complete with a hymnbook and an opportunity to partake of communion, is “Christianity Without Religion,” appealing to those with no other church home.

Christianity online reaches far beyond the blogosphere, as was evident in March 2011 with the publicity surrounding mega-church minister Rob Bell’s book Love Wins: A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. He is a universalist, critics screamed, launching him onto morning news programs on television and the pages of the New York Times and USA Today and the cover of Time magazine.

The issues of homosexuality and feminist theology led to church splits in mainline denominations in America and around the world. Speaking out forcefully for traditional values was Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who insisted that an acceptance of the gay and lesbian lifestyle and same-sex unions was not consistent with Christian teachings. Decades earlier such lifestyle issues were brought into the political arena by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority and other networks of the religious right, including James Dobson’s Focus on the Family. But the most influential religious figure in this era, holding the line against liberalism in all of its forms, was John Paul II, who reigned as pope for more than twenty-six years (1978–2005).

In the meantime, from the Americas to Africa to Asia, megachurches mushroomed and celebrity ministers built networks and wrote books. Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven series became a worldwide industry. In Korea, Assemblies of God preacher David Yonggi Cho built the world’s largest church based on the concept of cell groups.

One of the most striking and least publicized religious developments of the late twentieth century was the transformation of the Worldwide Church of God. Founded by Herbert W. Armstrong in the 1930s, the movement drew from a wide range of unorthodox teachings and was tightly controlled by its authoritarian leader. On his death in 1986, under the direction of Joseph Tkach, the movement began assessing its beliefs and in the following years moved fully into evangelical orthodoxy. Never before in church history had a cultic movement turned so completely around and become part of the wider community of Christians.

A TRANSFORMING MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

We are currently living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide. Over the past five centuries or so, the story of Christianity has been inextricably bound up with that of Europe and European-derived civilizations overseas, above all in North America. Until recently, the overwhelming majority of Christians have lived in White nations…. Over the past century, however, the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably southward, to Africa, Asia, and Latin America…. This global perspective should make us think carefully before asserting “what Christians believe” or “how the church is changing.” … The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetimes, and the day of Southern Christianity is dawning.

Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom

C. S. Lewis: Fiction Writer and Apologist

His books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold more than 100 million copies. Hollywood versions of The Chronicles of Narnia (beginning in 2005) grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide. Yet, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), despite his autobiographical books and articles, remains elusive. By his dress and appearance and associations he was hardly “cool” and might even have been described as an “old fogey,” but today he steps out of his writings as the freshest and most fashionable of his contemporaries. Yet he remains a mystery. Formative events in his childhood offer insights. One episode perhaps rises above all others. He is ten years old. Lying in bed unable to sleep, he hears footsteps in the hall, and then the creaking of his bedroom door. Shivering in the darkness, he waits for the words he has so dreaded. The silhouette framed in the doorway is his father. There is no way to soften the news. His mother is dead. He knew it was coming; her cancer has been worsening. But nothing can ease the awful aching.

Life had been carefree for him growing up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the first decade of the twentieth century. He lived on the outskirts of town with his parents and his older brother Warren, and every day the boys were out in the fields and woodlands looking for new adventures. Young “Jack” and “Warrie” went to church on Sundays with their parents and were taught to say their prayers every night. During his mother’s illness, his faith was actually strengthened. He prayed fervently for her recovery, and he believed God would heal her. If there was a God who answers prayers, why wouldn’t God heal his mother? These questions haunted him in the years that followed while he was away at prep school. Sometimes he found himself doubting whether there was any point in praying at all. Yet during this time he began to listen in church and read the Bible. The fear of hell so gripped him that sometimes he prayed passionately on his knees long into the night, pleading for God to hear him.

This struggle to find God begins to fade during his teenage years when he transfers to a different prep school, however. Here the house matron reaches out to him as a surrogate mother and fills a missing void in his life. Her fascination with spiritualism soon becomes his own. Intrigued by the occult world of spirits and the supernatural, he gradually comes to regard Christianity as no more than a legend.

His life changes drastically in 1917, three years after England is swept into World War I. He enlists in the army and is soon on the front line in France confronting daily the horrors of combat. He loses two of his closest buddies and is sent home wounded. “My memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years,” he later wrote. “I think death would be much better than to live through another war.” For Jack Lewis there were no easy answers. Where was God in this carnage?

Following the Great War he enrolls at Oxford and then moves on to a teaching career. Influenced by George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, and others, he is drawn into Christian ways of thinking through their imaginative writings. Of MacDonald’s Phantastes, he writes: “What it did to me was to convert, even to baptize … my imagination.” He begins to sense that God is hunting him down and closing in on him. Finally, while a teaching fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, he realizes he can no longer escape:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

In the years that follow he becomes a strong defender of the faith, writing and speaking widely. This apologetics period of his life, however, ends on a negative note. In 1948, British Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe delivers a devastating critique of his book Miracles to the Oxford Socratic Club. With logic and razor-sharp wit, she demonstrates that his proof for the supernatural is wanting. Lewis defends his position, but the consensus is that he has been defeated. His own reaction is one of bitter disappointment and depression. In the following years he turns to Christian mythology.

Magdalen College, Oxford

A DOUBTING APOLOGIST

A Grief Observed reveals many things about Lewis but none more important than that he was ultimately undone by the problem of contrary evidence…. The later Lewis had felt the full impact of religious doubt, and although he could not abandon his faith, neither could he claim a greater certainty than he had attained. His perplexities remained, and he acknowledged them with a degree of intellectual integrity that is as remarkable as it is rare. The Lewis of the ‘60s is no longer the Apostle to the Skeptics, acutely surveying the present state of the evidence, but the Reminder to the Forgetful, humbly searching for just enough light to face the day that lies ahead. Yet this is the Lewis of greatest personal stature, the Lewis who survives the collapse of his own arguments, and the Lewis who remains worthy of our highest and unqualified respect.

John Beversluis, “Beyond the Double Bolted Door.”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), the first and best-known volume of the Chronicles of Narnia, had its origins in Lewis’s teen years, when he imagined “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” Decades later he retrieves the image from his memory and begins toying with a story. Then “Asian came bounding into it”—Asian, who “pulled the whole story together.” As he allows the story and the characters to develop, he presents in narrative form a theology of incarnation, atonement, and resurrection.

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

C. S. Lewis

In 1956, in his late fifties, Lewis marries Joy Davidson, an American with whom he had corresponded. It is a marriage made in heaven—but for its brevity. After her death in 1960, he relives the unanswered prayer of a ten-year-old boy. He feels utterly abandoned. “Meanwhile, where is God?” he demands, in A Grief Observed. “Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.” In the midst of such silence some turn away from God. Lewis does not. Rather, he confronts God in his anger. “All that stuff about the cosmic sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get: the pleasure of hitting back.”

Although Lewis moved beyond his bitter grief, during the last years of his life he expressed less certainty than he had in earlier years. Yet he left behind a body of work that offered a sense of security that had eluded him.

Martin Luther King Jr.: Preacher and Civil Rights Activist

Perhaps as much as any other figure in recent times, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) illustrates the influence of church history on a life and ministry. When he was five years old, he traveled to Germany with his father. Inspired by the life and legacy of Martin Luther, Mike King changed his own name and that of his son. If a mere monk could transform the course of history, so also could a black preacher and his son from Atlanta. In the following years that name would inspire and prod the young boy. Indeed, living up to the legend of Luther was daunting for a black youth in the American South.

King’s father was not an obvious Reformation tourist. The son of an often-drunk sharecropper, Mike King grew up barely literate on the bottom rung of rural black society. Though ridiculed by classmates, themselves impoverished, for having manure on his shoes and smelling no better than a barnyard mule, Mike King had dreams. Making his way to Atlanta, he edged his way into the lowest level of church work and set his mind to marrying the preacher’s daughter, Alberta Williams, the most eligible young lady at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Marrying her set the stage for Mike to succeed his father-in-law in 1931. With some four hundred in attendance, the church struggled amid a sea of poverty. But King was determined to turn things around. Before the decade was over attendance was in the thousands as the authoritarian young preacher developed ingenious fund-raising tactics and wielded tight control of the congregation.

One of three children, Martin Luther King Jr. grew up under the rousing “talk-back” preaching of his father. At seven he stepped forward to get saved and join the church. He later admitted that he “joined the church not out of any dynamic conviction, but out of a childhood desire to keep up with my sister.” Approaching his teen years, he began to challenge his Sunday school teachers. Simply accepting the given wisdom “was contrary to the very nature of my being,” he remembered. “I had always been the questioning and precocious type.” Despite his doubts he was part of the church community, and simply walking away from faith was not an option. Then, in his mid-teens he sensed his own calling: “My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something, on the contrary it was an inner urge calling me to serve humanity.” Skipping two grades in high school, he entered Morehouse College at fifteen. Not until three years later did he deliver his first sermon. However, it was devoid of the flare and showmanship of his father, who sang out the words in rhythmic waves. In fact, young Martin deplored such preaching, opting rather to present a more serious and intellectually stimulating discourse.

Martin Luther King Jr.

From Morehouse, King (now ordained) enrolled at Crozer Theological Seminary and later Boston University, where he was awarded a doctorate in 1955. In the meantime he marries Coretta Scott and becomes the minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta. In the ensuing years the routine of family life with four young children is mixed with pulpit ministry and social activism. His involvement with the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and his service with the Alabama Council on Human Relations paves the way for a leading role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and directing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He knows well, however, that such leadership offers few rewards and many perils—perils that often put families at risk.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today….

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning “My country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father’s died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

Let freedom ring…. Let freedom ring.

Martin Luther King Jr.

His most persistent philosophical theme is nonviolence—a worldview that solidifies in his mind while visiting the Gandhi family in 1959. “Since being in India,” he writes, “I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity. In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.”

His followers are becoming weary of the rhetoric when beaten back by clubs and tear gas. But King keeps the volunteers in line with sit-ins throughout the South staged by black students and their white allies. However, this peaceful protest is met with violence, particularly as “freedom riders” board busses and demand accommodations at hotels. Amid the backlash, King is jailed. The night following his release, he is alone in his kitchen thinking back on his wedding night spent in a friend’s funeral home because accommodations for blacks were not available. Conscious of his wife and little girl sleeping close by, he senses God’s presence:

And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted and loyal wife, who was over there asleep…. And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore. I was weak…. I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it…. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage.” … And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”

Spurred by a new sense of calling, he vows to fill jails to overflowing with nonviolent agitators “to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” With that goal in mind, Birmingham becomes the focus. As had been true elsewhere, peaceful marches and boycotts are met with vicious attacks. Yet his grand strategy of nonviolent protest paves the way for the demise of the segregationist Jim Crow laws. The 1963 March on Washington is the setting for his “Let Freedom Ring” speech to more than a quarter-million people both black and white. I have a dream becomes embedded in American consciousness. But the protest for which King is best remembered occurs in Selma. Indeed, President Lyndon Johnson declares that Selma will be remembered in American history along with Lexington and Concord and Appomattox.

Just before Selma, King travels to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and to the White House to talk with President Lyndon Johnson. “I left the mountaintop of Oslo and the mountaintop of the White House,” he later recalled, “and two weeks later went on down to the valley of Selma.” The issue brought to the fore in Selma is voting rights for blacks, and King vows that his work will not be complete until blacks have equality at the ballot box. Once again he meets with fierce resistance and is jailed. He misses the next march from Selma to Montgomery: “I had been away for two straight Sundays and therefore felt that I owed it … to my parishioners to be on hand for the Sunday service … to administer the Lord’s Supper and baptism.”

When what was supposed to be a peaceful march turns into “Bloody Sunday,” he is filled with remorse: “I shall never forget my agony of conscience for not being there when I heard of the dastardly acts perpetrated against nonviolent demonstrators that Sunday.” When the march eventually takes place, some inside the movement accuse King of being too weak. His speech at the end of the march on the steps of the Alabama state capitol offers conciliatory words—too conciliatory, critics say—in the midst of hate and violence: “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he reminds the crowd, “but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

In the three short years that follow, King continues to march and organize and to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church. Early in 1968 he leads the Poor People’s Campaign to Washington D.C. In late March, he travels to Memphis to offer his support to black sanitary workers who are on strike, demanding equal pay with whites. In a speech on April 3, he reflects on a death threat that had delayed his flight to Memphis:

REFLECTIONS ON RACISM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

The Ku Klux Klan had an almost mystical hold on our imaginations…. I remember a Fourth of July rally held at a fairgrounds [where] … hooded Klansmen … began beating [black men] with fists and axe handles…. Although nearly four decades have passed, I can still hear the crowd’s throaty rebel yells, the victims’ pleas, and the crunch of the Klansmen’s bare fists against the flesh…. These memories of racism from my youth all came flooding back as I read biographies of Martin Luther King Jr…. He faced death threats from segregationists as well as the FBI. A bomb went off in his home. Black churches were burning every week in the south…. I better understand now the pressures that King faced his entire adult life, pressures that surely contributed to his failures…. I certainly once dismissed him. Yet now I can hardly read a page from King’s life, or a paragraph from his speeches, without sensing the centrality of his Christian conviction. I own a collection of his sermon tapes, and every time I listen to them I am swept up in the sheer power of his gospel-based message, delivered with an eloquence that has never been matched.

Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor

I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy tonight…. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

The following day King was killed by an assassin’s bullet. His last words were to the musician who was scheduled to play at an evening event: “Ben, make sure you play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord,’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.” His legacy, as perceived by many evangelicals, is often more negative than positive. They point to plagiarism, marital unfaithfulness, and liberal theology. But a dismissal of him fails to recognize the incredible role he played in serving as a Moses to his people. “I am many things to many people,” he wrote in 1965, three years before his death, “but … I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.”

Mother Teresa: Missionary Servant from Calcutta

The youngest of three children, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (1910–1997) was born into a prosperous family in Albania. When she was nine, however, her father died and left the family in dire straits. Her mother carried on with humanitarian outreach in the community—selfless service that does not go unnoticed by her youngest daughter. Assured of her mother’s blessing, she makes plans to become a missionary in India.

Mother Teresa

After training as a novice, Agnes takes vows in 1931 to become a Loreto sister (named Teresa) and is assigned to teach geography at St. Mary’s and later to serve as headmistress at that school. But she is not satisfied educating the daughters of India’s elite. She sees the desperately poor in the streets of Calcutta and envisions them as her mission field. She insists, however, that her calling has not come from the poor but rather from God: “This is how it happened. I was traveling to Darjeeling by train [for her annual retreat], when I heard the voice of God…. The message was clear. I must leave the convent to help the poor by living among them. This was a command, something to be done, something definite. I knew where I had to be. But I did not know how to get there.”

ATHEISTIC AUTHOR OF GOD IS NOT GREAT SLAMS MOTHER TERESA

One of the curses of India, as of other poor countries, is the quack medicine man, who fleeces the sufferer by promises of miraculous healing. Sunday [October 20, 2003, when Pope John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa] was a great day for these parasites…. More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of Mother Teresa…. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

Christopher Hitchens, “Mommie Dearest: The Pope Beatifies Mother Teresa.”

MOTHER TERESA, PATRON, NO PLASTER SAINT

I am surprised at the flurry of discussion and concern about this aspect of Mother Teresa’s inner life, because spiritual teachers have long taught about the dark night of the soul. St John of the Cross spoke eloquently about this phenomenon…. Mother Teresa wonderfully was no plaster cast saint. She has helped to affirm many who are passing through this period of desolation and dryness when God seems so remote.

Desmond Tutu, “On Faith.”

With students from the Loreto school working alongside her, Teresa applied to Rome for permission to form a new congregation—and to India for citizenship. Wearing saris, not habits, she and her followers made themselves part of the culture. The Missionaries of Charity, which she founded in 1950, was not a convent separated from the world of vice and degradation. “Our Sisters must go out on the street,” she insisted. “They must take the tram like our people, or walk to where they are going. That is why we must not start institutions and stay inside. We must not stay behind walls and have our people come to us.”

In the 1960s, after the Missionaries of Charity had experienced significant growth, Teresa departed from her adopted homeland for the first time in more than three decades to establish mission outposts around the world. Although she avoided publicity, publicity found her. In 1971 Malcolm Muggeridge published Something Beautiful for God. Because of that book and other flattering media exposure, more young women committed their lives to the work. Money poured in, and lay ministries were organized. The little woman in the Indian sari and tattered sweater became a saint long before the Vatican could conduct an investigation. In 1979 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

When asked how she identified herself, Teresa responded: “By blood and origin, I am all Albanian. My citizenship is Indian. I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the whole world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to Jesus.” Yet she struggled throughout her life with doubts: “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she wrote to a cleric. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak.”

Desmond Tutu: Bishop and Warrior Against Apartheid

Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1984) as well as the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism and the Gandhi Peace Prize, Desmond Tutu (1931-) is recognized far beyond the borders of his homeland of South Africa. He survived childhood sickness and demeaning racial segregation to become the first black Anglican archbishop of Cape Town and one of the foremost Christian leaders of his time.

One of three children, he was born in Klerksdorp, Transvaal. His father was a teacher who struggled with alcohol, while his mother kept the family together with her menial labor. He moved with his family to Johannesburg when he was twelve, at that time dreaming of becoming a medical doctor. Unable to afford the education, he enrolled in a teacher training school and then taught at a black high school. However, he left that profession in protest when the government passed legislation downgrading education for all blacks.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

From the field of education, he turned to theological studies and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1960. Two years later he was awarded funding for further theological training at King’s College, London. Joining him there were his wife, Leah, and their two children. After returning to Africa, he served as a chaplain and taught theology. In 1972 he returned to London to serve as a director for the World Council of Churches. Throughout his career he was an outspoken social critic. “Why do the expatriates live in so much better homes, segregated by a green belt from the village where the national staff live? Because the mission boards pay the rents for missionaries and the nationals can’t afford the rents. Well, damn the mission boards.”

It is in the realm of theological studies, however, that Tutu finds himself to be most out of touch with the Western worldview. He insists that there is no one theology that can be universally applied to all cultures. The very questions theology seeks to answer are culturally biased. Western theologians, he points out, deal with matters of who or what is God, whether God actually exists, and whether God can be proved through Intelligent Design theory. “Our people,” Tutu argues, “did not doubt that God existed and they knew perfectly well what [the term] God meant. Nor did they need to be convinced that God was good and omnipotent.” Their concerns were of a different nature. One relates to the matter of suffering—not particularly why God allows suffering in general. “No, what they wanted to know was—why did this exquisite and excruciating suffering seem to isolate and concentrate so particularly on them?” Africans, he insists, must not claim to have a superior or universal theology but rather one that is relevant to their own circumstances:

Black theology is an engaged not an academic, detached theology. It is a gut level theology, relating to the real concerns, the life and death issues of the black man…. It is a clarion call for man to align himself with the God who is the God of the Exodus, God the liberator, who leads his people, all his people, out of all kinds of bondage—political, economic, cultural, the bondage of sin and disease, into the glorious liberty of the sons of God.

Black theology is not so naïve as to think that white oppression is the only bondage from which blacks need to be liberated. Sin and evil are as dehumanizing as white racism….

In his work with the World Council of Churches, Tutu travels to many African countries and forms networks with both political and religious leaders. This sets the stage for his role in fighting against apartheid when he returns to South Africa three years later in 1975 to serve as dean (senior minister) of the largely white St. Mary’s Cathedral in Johannesburg. The following year he is named bishop of Lesotho (a small country surrounded by South Africa). Leaving Johannesburg is a painful decision made more difficult in the weeks that follow by the Soweto Uprising. Students protesting the effects of apartheid—their progressively worsening educational system—take to the streets. Police crush the uprising with tear gas, dogs, and firearms. Before it is over, hundreds of youth are dead. Tutu is outraged by the lack of concern in his own white congregation.

From his position as bishop of Lesotho, he presses hard for changes, warning of even greater violence. In 1978, when P. W. Botha becomes prime minister, Tutu challenges him from his new post as general secretary of the South African Council of Churches. From that key position he calls for economic sanctions against the government of his own country. It is a call for nations and corporations to take their investments out of South Africa. While President Reagan is calling for “friendly persuasion,” Tutu insists that nothing short of a radical economic shunning will force the white government to give equal rights to blacks. In the decade that follows he is on a roller coaster of highs and lows. On the one hand he is terrorized by death threats to his family and tortured by the fear that boycotts will only bring more suffering to poor blacks. On the other hand he is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and elected archbishop of Cape Town.

In the end, the anti-apartheid forces win. The most stunning signal comes in 1990, when political prisoner Nelson Mandela is freed after nearly twenty-seven years in prison. Four years later Mandela is the duly elected president of South Africa. But Tutu’s hardest work is just beginning. As chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is his duty to investigate more than three decades of accusations and crimes and to bring about reconciliation. Forgiveness is required—a concept that at one time seemed impossible on a national level. It is nothing short of “crazy,” as Tutu admits, but it is the only way to move ahead. Whether demanding an end to apartheid or calling for reconciliation, he looks to one book more than any other as his guide. “Why should you need Marxist ideology,” he asks on one occasion. “The Bible is dynamite…. Nothing could be more radical.”

AN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE FROM A YALE PROFESSOR

We cannot afford to be churlish about the missionary roots of Christian renewal in Africa. We should recognize today’s immense vernacular gains as springing out of the translation ferment of the previous missionary era and the anticolonial sentiment it nursed…. Africans came to their sense of cultural and national self-awareness through the grammars, dictionaries, and the vernacular literacy of Christian missions. The missionary contribution of outsiders to the modern reawakening of Africa has few parallels, and should stand as a monument to the scaling down of cross-cultural barriers. We should give praise and honor to God that he raised in the Western church servants of his cause in Africa and elsewhere. The dry bones of many of these missionaries, rising from their unmarked graves, gave voices to our ancestors.

Lamin Sanneh, “Africa.”

“I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, “Now is that political or social?” He said, “I feed you.” Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.”

Desmond Tutu

Looking back over his career, Tutu reflected on the struggle against apartheid: “Many of us had moments when we doubted that apartheid would be defeated, certainly in our lifetime.” How then did he maintain his optimism? “When you look at something like Good Friday, and saw God dead on the cross, nothing could have been more hopeless than Good Friday. And then Easter happens, and whammo! Death is done to death, and Jesus breaks the shackles of death and devastation, of darkness, of evil. And from that moment on, you see, all of us are constrained to be prisoners of hope.”

Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World

The pious, unsophisticated Christian faith that dotted the rural landscape with clapboard churches in mid-twentieth-century America had all but vanished as the century came to a close. As hymnbooks and Wednesday-night prayer meetings gave way to worship teams and PowerPoint, the “old-time religion” was all but gone.

This was the faith that nourished William Franklin (Billy) Graham (1918-) as he was growing up, a faith passed down from his parents. His mother remembered how she made sure she had her Bible with her on their honeymoon: “I just wouldn’t have felt like a clean person without my Bible with me.” Before they went to bed on their wedding night, his parents knelt together to dedicate “our marriage and our family to the Lord.” Billy grew up immersed in a simple and strict piety. “We had Bible reading and prayer right after supper, even before I cleaned up the kitchen,” his mother recalled. “We all got down on our knees and prayed, yes we did, sometimes from twenty to thirty minutes. That was the main event of the day in our house.” Sundays were devoted to Sunday school, morning and evening church services, devotional reading, and sitting around the radio listening to Charles Fuller’s Old-Fashioned Revival Hour. Recreation was strictly forbidden.

After graduating from high school, Graham enrolled at Bob Jones University. But after struggling with all the rules and regulations, he soon transferred to Florida Bible Institute, aiming for a career in ministry. Following the completion of his degree, he enrolled at Wheaton College, graduating in 1943 and soon after marrying fellow student Ruth Bell, a missionary kid from China. “I saw her walking down the road towards me and I couldn’t help but stare at her as she walked,” he later recalled. “She looked at me and our eyes met and I felt that she was definitely the woman I wanted to marry.” In the following years, he conducted a radio ministry, served as the president of Northwestern College in Minneapolis, and co-founded Youth for Christ, working alongside Charles “Chuck” Templeton, who would also become a well-known evangelist—until he abandoned his faith as he later related in his memoir, Farewell to God.

Graham went on to conduct his Los Angeles campaign that would launch his evangelistic ministry in America and around the world. But not before he settled the matter of his own doubts that continued to haunt him. Indeed, just prior to his first campaign, “everything came to a climax.” Alone on a moonlit night at a retreat center in the San Bernardino Mountains, he knelt down, as he later testified, and prayed a prayer that would set the stage for his future ministry. Gripping a Bible, he poured out his heart: “Father, I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith. I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word.”

FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BILLY SUNDAY

That old time religion has gone as modern as an atomic bomb in the thunderous revival meetings that Rev. Billy Graham conducts nightly in a giant tent… Nothing detracts from the traditional fury and power of an old-fashioned gospel gathering. That’s what his listeners, many of whom remember with pleasure the late Billy Sunday, want. And that’s what they get.

Richard Reynolds, Los Angeles Daily News, September 30, 1949

The retreat center where Graham made his commitment is Forest Home Christian Conference Center, founded by Henrietta Mears who served as the director of Christian education at Hollywood First Presbyterian Church. Knowing Graham’s struggles, she had invited him to come at a time when he could be alone. He later wrote: “I doubt if any other woman outside my wife and mother has had such a marked influence on my life. She is certainly one of the greatest Christians I have ever known.”

Billy Graham

Like D. L. Moody generations earlier, Graham is aided considerably by print media. The California newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst sends a telegram to his editors: “Puff Graham.” Puff they do, and rival news outlets quickly join in. As was true with Moody’s ministry, the stories of his revivals sell papers. The favorable press reports put Graham in the spotlight. Thousands make their way to the Big Top, and the Los Angeles campaign is extended an additional five weeks. By the 1950s he is a celebrity. His picture is on the cover of Time magazine. In the following years he holds campaigns at one spacious venue after another, primarily in large cities from New York and London to Moscow and Beijing. Thousands sing in the choir, and tens of thousands fill the auditoriums.

One of the most unexpected developments in Graham’s ministry was his evangelistic tours to communist bloc countries and the Soviet Union at a time when such ministry was rare, particularly by one who spoke so adamantly against communism. Such cozying up with communists was controversial, as was his involvement in American politics, particularly when he publicly supported Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960. He later vowed to stay out of politics, and his five decades of ministry were relatively free from controversy, except for opposition from fundamentalists.

HAROLD OCKENGA AND BILLY GRAHAM

The Rev. Harold John Ockenga, pastor of the influential Par Street Church at the edge of the Boston Common, brought Graham to Boston and did as much as anyone to give Graham’s mission its larger shape. Ockenga and Graham both heralded the revival of 1950 as the greatest in New England since the Great Awakening. While Graham could well assume the role of Whitefield, the revival had no towering theologian to assume the role of Jonathan Edwards…. Yet Ockenga, a scholarly pastor who had earned a Ph.D. under J. Gresham Machen at Princeton and Westminster seminaries, did more than anyone else to launch a neo-evangelical movement that balanced revivalism with intellectual rigor.

George M. Marsden, “Minding a Malleable Movement.”

In the early 1960s Graham took a stand against segregation. Indeed, on one occasion his temper flared when he spotted ropes designed to separate whites from blacks in his crusade, and he tore them down in protest. During his 1957 crusade in New York City, he invited Martin Luther King Jr. to join him at the pulpit, and he maintained a warm relationship with him in the years that followed. Throughout his ministry he made a conscious choice to avoid the religious right and in fact is accused by some of “cozying up to liberals.” When invited by Jerry Falwell in 1979 to be part of the newly formed Moral Majority, he declined: “Evangelists cannot be closely identified with any particular party or person. We have to stand in the middle in order to preach to all people, right and left. I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will be in the future.”

GRAHAM’S PRODIGAL SONS

As Franklin grew older, I’d get calls from the police…. There’s quite a gap in age between Franklin and my fifth child, Ned. He was a loving child, but he also went through a period where he was involved with drugs. Looking back on it, it seems like just a few weeks ago. But it dragged on for years.

Ruth Bell Graham, Prodigals —

And Those Who Love Them

As Graham was reaching out to church leaders beyond the bounds of his own Southern Baptist denomination, he was also reaching out geographically. He conducted crusades on every continent and sponsored two major world congresses on evangelism, the first in Berlin (1966) and the second in Lausanne (1974), the latter hosting some twenty-four hundred delegates from one hundred and fifty countries. He also sponsored training conferences for thousands of itinerant evangelists (including women) from developing countries. A twentieth-century evangelist, he continued on into the twenty-first century—his last Crusade in New York in 2005—and lived to see all of his children following him in evangelistic ministry.

Late twentieth-century Christianity is far too encompassing to even begin to summarize. It draws from all nations and all denominations—more than two billion people who today identify themselves as Christians. Its worldwise influence and its celebrity adherents made it a force to be reckoned with. But outside the portals of power exists the essence of the faith—ordinary people simply seeking to follow Jesus, the man from Galilee.

What if …

What if Elizabeth Anscombe had not attacked C. S. Lewis on matters of miracles and the supernatural, thus pushing him away from apologetics into Christian fantasy? How would contemporary Christianity be different without the Chronicles of Narnia?

What if Mother Teresa had continued teaching geography to elite Indian girls? Would the world be poorer without her ministry, or are more people poor and sick, as Christopher Hitchens has claimed, because of her ministry?

What if Daddy King had not changed his name and that of his son and vowed to change the world even as Martin Luther did? What if Desmond Tutu had been funded for medical training? What if Billy Graham had starred in baseball instead of preaching? How would the world be different today?

24. Worldwide Christian Outreach: The Twentieth Century and Beyond

24. Worldwide Christian Outreach: The Twentieth Century and Beyond

CHAPTER 24

Worldwide Christian Outreach

The Twentieth Century and Beyond

PARADE OF HISTORY

RETIRED BISHOP REDIRECTS MISSION OUTREACH

EVERYDAY LIFE

THE HOLY OBSERVER

A TRANSFORMING MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

C. S. Lewis: Fiction Writer and Apologist

A DOUBTING APOLOGIST

Martin Luther King Jr.: Preacher and Civil Rights Activist

REFLECTIONS ON RACISM AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

Mother Teresa: Missionary Servant from Calcutta

ATHEISTIC AUTHOR OF GOD IS NOT GREAT SLAMS MOTHER TERESA

MOTHER TERESA, PATRON, NO PLASTER SAINT

Desmond Tutu: Bishop and Warrior Against Apartheid

AN AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE FROM A YALE PROFESSOR

Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World

FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF BILLY SUNDAY

HAROLD OCKENGA AND BILLY GRAHAM

GRAHAM’S PRODIGAL SONS

What if …

Further Reading