The year 1984 was “the springtime of Christian missions,” Fuller Seminary professor C. Peter Wagner told CT. He encouraged readers to look at church growth around the world.
The last couple of decades of the twentieth century hold forth more promise for the dynamic spread of the Christian faith around the globe than any other period of time since Jesus turned the water into wine. …
The decade of the seventies saw some of the most significant advances in world missions yet recorded. The academic field of missiology came into its own and opened new avenues of theory and practice for Christian mission. New missionary agencies began to spring up in the Third World like daffodils in May. New research and receptivity advanced Muslim work to a degree that few could have anticipated. The bamboo curtain lifted in China and revealed that some of the most vigorous church growth in history had been going on all the while. …
I am often amused by Christians who are overly nostalgic. They say, “My, the Christian church is in terrible shape. If we could only go back to the first century, we would know what God really can do through a dedicated church.” I don’t think we’re perfect today by any means, but I disagree with that perspective. I honestly think that if Luke himself could have the choice, he would rather live today than in the first century. When we lift up our eyes to what God is doing worldwide today, that early activity around the eastern Mediterranean seems like a small pilot project compared to what is happening now.
CT invited Paul Yonggi Cho, pastor of a 350,000-person megachurch in South Korea, to explain “how the world’s largest church got that way.” His answer was “cell groups.”
A cell group is the basic part of our church. It is not another church program. It has a limited size, usually not more than 15 families. It has a definite goal, set by my associate ministers and me, a definite plan given to each cell in written form. It has definite leadership, trained in our school. It has a homogeneous membership—that is, the people who comprise it are similar in background. …
There is one basic sociological principle that must be maintained for cell groups to be successful. That principle is homogeneity. By homogeneity I mean like, or similar, in kind. … Our national culture is divided more along the lines of education and profession. Therefore, medical doctors, college professors, and other professional people will have more in common with one another than with factory workers and waiters. Housewives will find more in common with other housewives than with female teachers. We found that cell groups based upon this homogeneous principle were more successful than cell groups based primarily on geographical lines.
I have discovered that groups based on geographical considerations alone tend to bring people together who have little in common, what we call heterogeneous cell groups. So much time and energy will be spent trying to develop a feeling of oneness that the main purpose of reaching the lost and caring for the sheep will not be as effective.
Ever since author George Orwell named his novel about the absurd logic of authoritarianism 1984, the year had invoked images of totalitarian oppression. A CT editor took the opportunity of the date to explore the classic novel’s depiction of evil.
Orwell describes … the process whereby an evil order overwhelms the people who try to fight it. His evil powers seek more than victory—they seek to convert the rebels to their way of thinking, making perfect conformity.
Orwell’s understanding of good and evil are not far from Christian; according to 1984, the antidotes to political poison lie in truthful words and loving acts, and he spells out what that means. Only his conclusion needs correction. He knew evil, he knew the good that evil wants to destroy. But he did not understand the strength that can endure and paradoxically conquer under the most savage victory of evil. To understand that, he would have needed to understand the Cross.
Another danger loomed in 1984: computer scientists working on “artificial intelligences that will fundamentally and irrevocably change what we call human.”
It is difficult to imagine the significance of what is coming. But think of what the world was like 75 years ago in the auto industry. That is about where AI is today. (The computer business is, to all intents and purposes, AI.) There is one significant difference, however. Although the auto industry changed aspects of our lives, intelligent machines will change thought, reason, and imagination in a way that has never happened previously. The only comparable change was the invention of writing and later the invention of printing technology. But even those may not have been as revolutionary as AI. Because of this, artificial intelligence has profound implications for Christians.
The union between man—old Adam—and an artificial intelligence creates a new Adam, a whole whose sum is greater than its parts. What we have is a creature not made by God in his image, but made by us in our image. We will stand to this creation as God stands to us. At the same time, the machine mind will in certain ways far surpass our own—even surpass those minds that originally created it. It would be like our having the ability to surpass God, which, of course, is what we have been trying to acquire since the Garden of Eden. Now we may finally be able to try. (What will be interesting is whether our creation treats us as we have treated God, a colleague remarked to us.)
Christians, we are afraid, have little to prepare them for what is coming.
In the present, evangelicals mourned the passing of Francis Schaeffer, a former fundamentalist who developed apologetics through cultural engagement:
He was known for founding L’Abri (French for “shelter”), his Swiss mission to youth and intellectuals, and for authoring 25 books.
“I’m simply an old-fashioned evangelist,” Schaeffer often said. He tried to proclaim that Christianity is true, that God is there, and that God can be rationally known. As a result, he said, the church can give “honest answers to honest questions.” …
Two films helped move Schaeffer’s analysis into the thinking of ordinary church people. How Should We Then Live? (1977) documented the decline of culture in the absence of a Christian world view. Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979) exposed the cheapening of human life that followed the loss of the Christian view of man.
CT Reports from Nixon’s Trip to Communist China
CT profiled several other figures helping people think through contemporary issues, including Jacques Ellul and George F. Will. The magazine had questions about Will’s religious commitment.
Will’s columns often evidence a spirit of respect for Christianity, but his references to the faith have been allusive. He speculates about the Shroud of Turin, for example, but offers no conclusions about the man the shroud may or may not have covered. He comments on the Bible only to note that such modern translations as “Don’t murder” over “Thou shalt not kill” are atrocious. …
Will is an Episcopalian and says he goes to church because a “good friend prodded me and I got to thinking about Christianity.” An intensely thoughtful man, he admits religion is one area he has not thought much about. … He touches on several political and social issues important to evangelicals, such as abortion, the activity of the Moral Majority, and the church’s role in what Will calls soulcraft. Other matters that he trenchantly addresses, such as the AIDS epidemic and the welfare system, concern all compassionate citizens, religious and secular.
CT celebrated the growth of Christian ministry in professional sports.
“The NFL is in the midst of a spiritual awakening,” says Jim Brenn, who leads chapels and Bible studies for the Washington Redskins. “It has spread to athletes at the college and even the high school level. These guys are searching for something deeper than they’ve found in football.”
The burgeoning NFL chapel movement was pioneered by Ira Lee “Doc” Eshleman, a retired minister. In the late sixties, when America’s young people were rebelling against traditional authority, Eshleman believed professional athletes could reach them.
“I’ll never forget those first chapels,” he reflects. “There was one in Detroit. Hardly anyone came. But after it was over, a little bald-headed fellow came up to me and said, ‘Doc, all my life I go to church in de old country. I go to de alter. I sing in de choir. But I never know what it means to be a Christian until today. Today I pray. Today I invite Jesus into my life.’”
CT also reported on “a growing network of evangelical organizations based on the premise that there is no such thing as a genetic condition of homosexuality,” like one in Washington, DC, offering hope to “homosexuals who want to change.”
Judy Lowry, a 34-year-old seminary student … reluctantly answered an insistent call from God.
Knowing nothing about homosexuals, Lowry seemed to meet them at every turn. She was touched by their compulsive need to talk to someone and their isolation from families who had sent them packing.
Lowry accompanied a gay friend to a bar one evening in 1979. At the bar, she says, she experienced “an incredible need to be there and to share with them. I had to go back.”
Inside the small, garishly lit bar, someone asked the inevitable question: “What are you doing here?” She mentioned her interest in counseling and her Christian faith and added, “I think you guys need someone to talk to.” In a matter of weeks, after prayer and affirmation from her mother and pastor Louis Evans of National Presbyterian Church, Lowry’s tentative trips to the bar became an eight-hour-a-day ministry.
Evangelicals organized to oppose the gay rights movement in California, pressuring the governor to veto a bill prohibiting employment discrimination.
Gov. George Deukmejian was swamped by nearly 100,000 phone calls and letters—thought to be the most ever received by a California governor on a single subject. An overwhelming number of those contacting the governor opposed the bill.
The Republican governor agonized for 13 days before vetoing the bill last month. Support for the veto was organized by the Sacramento-based Committee on Moral Concerns, headed by W. B. Timberlake, a retired Southern Baptist preacher and a former lawyer.
“Several Christian radio and television stations and a lot of people were alerted,” said Art Croney, the committee’s associate lobbyist.
The biggest theological controversy of the year was also centered in California. Megachurch pastor Robert Schuller’s messages about self-esteem and “possibility thinking” drew people to church but seemed to reject orthodox Christian teaching about sin. CT sent three evangelical leaders to grill him.
When you refer to sin, do you mean something different than, say, Billy Graham means?
Actually, I made a commitment to Jesus when Billy preached at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. And I have signed the Lausanne Covenant. It has been said that I am just an old Protestant liberal; that is just not true. …
Do you subscribe to the historic creeds of the church?
Yes, I accept the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian creeds.
Is the Christology of the Reformers different from yours?
Absolutely not! I don’t have a single problem with the Christology of Calvin or Luther.
People question your understanding of the relation of sin to mission.
Something is terribly wrong in the area of theology today, because people aren’t responding to the gospel as they should. We’re forced to say either that we have a poor product, or that we don’t understand it well enough to communicate it in terms listeners can grasp. If they’re dying, and they are; and going to hell, and they are; and we have the best thing in the world, and it’s free; then why aren’t they flocking in? Somebody is doing something wrong. I say we’re doing something wrong. … Our job is to figure out how to present the living Christ in a way that people will effectively meet him.
Schuller’s approach would later be called “seeker sensitive.” One of the men who investigated his orthodoxy, former editor in chief Kenneth Kantzer, said Schuller got some things right, but offered an incomplete gospel.
His root problem is simply this: he is so earnestly zealous to win people and make them happy, that he jeopardizes the possibility of making them holy. …
Those who appeal only to the divine love and a gospel of sweetness and light may win all those who find sweetness and light attractive. But those who are won discover on the inside a holy God who does not condone sin. Our Lord never stopped short of presenting the gospel in its wholeness. He invited to his kingdom those who recognized the infinite worth of the human soul and who wished to turn from sin to seek the good. If our ultimate goal for humans is Christlike goodness, we must follow Jesus in presenting the wholeness of the biblical message.
Jesus Christ is Savior. It is important to say that he saves from a low self-image, one that fails to account for the value of a human soul.
But Jesus is not just that. He is also savior from sin and all its consequences.
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