Page 4443 – Christianity Today (2024)

Recently, I called up a Methodist minister I’ve known for some years. I was in his area for a few weeks, and I hoped to find a time when he and I could squeeze in lunch. “Tuesday’s out,” he said. “I have a funeral. And on Wednesday I have two funerals; Thursday I am booked with counseling; and on Friday I have to attend an unveiling at the Jewish ceremony. Saturday?”

A lot of death, I thought, and when we met at a coffee bar on Saturday, I asked him how he got through a week where he was bombarded with so much bereavement and loss. “Well, I’ve been doing this for 20 years,” he said, “and it comes and goes in cycles. I may go through the next three or four weeks and not have a single funeral.”

We got to talking about what a funeral entailed from the minister’s perspective. Did he go with the family to pick out the casket? I asked. Did he hang around the funeral parlor during the viewing of the body? “I do usually go with them to pick the casket out,” he told me. “I guess I’ve been down to Bob’s funeral parlor three times in the last week. That’s where I always send people, of course; Bob and I worked out an agreement a long time ago that he’d give me a little cut of whatever profit he made selling caskets to the folks I sent his way. Like at summer camp, you know, where your kids get 10 percent off their tuition if they manage to sell some other family on the same camp.”

Call me daft, but I failed to see the parallel between a camp’s offering a financial incentive to satisfied families who might pass along the camp’s brochure to another family, and a minister who directed his parishioners to a particular funeral parlor because he got a percentage of the profits. It seemed at the very least like a conflict of interest, but I figured that if my friend saw it that way, he wouldn’t have been so cavalier about mentioning it to me over chai latte and biscotti. And when it turned out that he had two funerals the next week, I dug out a navy dress and heels and slipped in discreetly to the funeral of an elderly lady who had died in her sleep. I was not surprised to notice that the casket was one of the most gussied-up monstrosities I’d ever seen—all pastel and shiny, satiny, and lacquered looking. It looked like a giant Easter egg had met the interior of a luxury automobile. “I bet that cost a mint,” I thought. I couldn’t help wondering if my friend were knocking off his parishioners: maybe he, Bob, and the local arsenic dealer had a three-way deal.

The American Way of Death Revisited,
by Jessica Mitford, Alfred A. Knopf,
296 pp.; $25.

In Roughing It, Mark Twain tells the story of Jacops the coffin maker, who “used to go roosting around where people was sick, waiting for ’em,” towing with him a coffin that he imagined would “fit the can’idate.” Robbins, an elderly man, took sick and for almost a month, “in frosty weather,” Jacops loitered around the Robbins place, coffin in hand, waiting for the old man to kick off. Much to Jacops’s disappointment, Robbins got well; the next time he got sick, Jacops gave the old man a bargain. “He bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back with twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn’t like the coffin after he’d tried it.” During the funeral, Robbins, who hadn’t been dead after all, climbed out of the coffin and collected his $35.

When Jessica Mitford published The American Way of Death, her muckraking expose of the American funeral industry in 1963, she revealed that twentieth-century coffin makers—and undertakers, vault manufacturers, florists, and monument makers (she’s pretty nice to clergy)—had no more scruples than their nineteenth-century predecessor Jacops. The American Way of Death, which was a bestseller for months, portrayed an industry of bloodsuckers who were out to squeeze every possible penny from grieving families. Before her death in 1996, Mitford had all but put the finishing touches on an updated account of the funeral industry, which has now been published. The original version sent shock waves through the professional funeral community in the 1960s—the author became known as “the notorious Jessica Mitford,” and Mortuary Management began referring to her simply as Jessica, a la Jackie or Malcolm. But has her book had any lasting impact? Has the funeral industry been forced to shape up in response to the outrage elicited by Mitford’s book?

In The American Way of Death Revisited, Mitford suggests that those dying at the end of the twentieth century will be no better off than those who died 40 years before. Prices have continued to skyrocket. Undertakers continue to charge outrageous amounts for applying cosmetics to the corpse, embalming, the use of a hearse, flowers, the casket. To sell expensive procedures and goods, undertakers have taken to outright lying, telling customers, for example, that embalming is required by law. In 1961, the average cost for a casket and “services” was $750. It is now—and this according to the presumably conservative figures of the industry itself—a whopping $4,700, “to which must be added the cost of a burial vault, flowers, clothing, clergy and musician’s honorarium, and cemetery charges. When these costs are added to the undertaker’s bill, the total average cost for an adult’s funeral today is $7,800.”

The casket, of course, is where the undertaker will really stick you. The Reverend Laurence Cross, of the Berkeley Community Church, described casket sales to Mitford like this:

First, you come to a magnificent casket—it’s like a pink show window. You’d think it had the Queen’s jewels on display. The inside is made of beautiful satin and it’s set out on a thick white carpet. You walk along and come to the next one. There’s another beauty, maybe in a different pastel shade. You see a few more, and then you come to the absolute end. There aren’t any more. Those you have seen are priced very high.

Most people, the Reverend Mr. Cross explained, say to themselves,

“I hadn’t planned to spend that much, but since these are my only options, I guess I’ll have to get one.” Only the very bold tell the undertaker that his goods are outside their price range and that they’ll have to go somewhere else. For those few bold bereaved, however, the funeral director opens a door you never knew existed. You go into another room where there are maybe half a dozen caskets—in less attractive colors than the other beauties—and at somewhat lower prices. That’s where the psychology comes in. The average person who has managed to avoid the more expensive caskets now feels that at least he has saved several hundred dollars. But if you’re mean as the devil, you may still insist that the caskets you’ve seen are more than you were prepared to pay. So you go through the same procedure. The funeral director opens yet another door you never knew existed, and here are some for even less. If you are still so mean that you won’t spend that much, you are led into the last room. Here the funeral director … shows you an ugly casket, maybe purple in color. The cheap ones are purposely made up in hideous colors, and they have no handles, no lining. If you still won’t buy that, you are taken from there through a concrete alleyway as dark as Egypt. You come to a garage where all the funeral cars are parked. Then he pulls out a box. It’s just six pieces of redwood nailed together. … He’ll charge anything he can get out of you for it.

Those looking to avoid the high cost and the fuss of funerals have often turned to cremation as an alternative. Mitford has bad news for those of us who, like me, envision cremation as a simple and frugal way to dispose of our remains. I am not alone in thinking cremation is the way to go. In 1961, only 3.75 percent of the American dead were cremated; in 1995, that figure was up to 21 percent, and it’s still on the rise.

The funeral industry declared an all-out war upon the trade rule, which one member of the industry publicly described as “a Soviet-style piece staged by the Federal Trade Commission.”

For cremation done right, go to England. There, 72 percent of the dead are cremated, usually for around $280, which includes the use of a chapel (an amenity not often provided in American cremations). Every effort is made by English crematoria to facilitate the scattering—or “strewing” as English clerics call it—of the ashes, and when families do opt to preserve the ashes in an urn, then a simple but tasteful container is provided.

American crematoria are a different story. As Mitford tells it, “cremation has become just another way of making a buck, principally through the sale of the niche and urn, plus ‘perpetual care,’ for the ashes. Cemetery men are most reluctant to relinquish the ashes for any form of private disposition; as one told me rather plaintively, ‘If everyone wanted to take the ashes away and scatter them or bury them privately, we’d soon be out of business.’ “

Cemetery lobbyists pushed a bill through the California legislature that made the scattering of ashes in any public or private area illegal—and, not surprisingly, undertakers rarely acknowledge to families that it is legal simply to take the ashes home with you and stick them on your mantel or in your closet. Increasingly, the cremation urn is becoming akin to the casket—funeral directors push the fanciest, most expensive urns upon customers, often exploitatively.

In 1993, Ron Hast, editor of Mortuary Management, described a scene where several siblings turned up to purchase several urns to hold a portion of their mother’s ashes. “There was something of a power struggle to see who would purchase the nicest urn.” It is not unusual for a fancy urn to cost over $1,500. During a 1997 “Keys to Cremation Success” symposium sponsored by the Funeral Service Insider, one presentation was called “How to add $1,400 or More to Each Cremation Call.” The presenter told his audience that “Seeing Mom in a cardboard box sometimes prompts a family member to ask if we don’t have something a little nicer.” A similar suggestion was put forward by the Funeral Service Insider: “When families don’t buy an urn, require them to purchase a temporary container to hold the cremains. But make sure you label (or stamp) that box with the words ‘temporary container’ on all four sides. … That makes families most likely to upgrade beyond the temporary container.”

In 1975, it looked like things had improved a little for the general public vis-a-vis funerals. The Federal Trade Commission, after a two-year study, put forward a “trade rule” that required that the consumer would have a right to choose or refuse services such as embalming or grief counseling, with an appropriate reduction in cost for those customers who refused such services; that prices must be quoted over the telephone; that undertakers had to inform customers that embalming was not required by law; that the cheapest casket must be displayed with the others; and that funeral providers would be prohibited from telling the customer that the “eternal sealer” casket will preserve the embalmed corpse for a long or indefinite time.

Mild and straightforward as these measures may seem, the funeral industry declared an all-out war upon the trade rule, which one member of the industry publicly described as “a Soviet-style piece staged by the FTC.” Within three years, two components of the rule had been omitted—the section that required undertakers to display their cheapest caskets with the other caskets, and the section that prohibited the undertaker from trying to influence the customer’s choice of goods and services. When the public hearings about the final adoption of the rule finally occurred in 1984, consumer advocates had concluded that only a minimal protection for funeral shoppers had been left in place.

But as Mitford shows, even that protection has proved, in the intervening decade and a half, merely nominal. The FTC, which “makes no effort to ascertain whether funeral establishments are complying with the rule,” declared in 1990 that “the Rule has not contributed to a general reduction in the price of funerals.” In 1994, Lisa Carlson, author of Caring for Your Own Dead, conducted a survey of Vermont’s 70 funeral homes and determined that none were in full compliance with the FTC’s rule. In 1996, the FTC and the National Funeral Directors Association struck a new deal. “Under the new plan,” Mitford tells us, “no longer will funeral homes be subject to a fine for violating the rule.” In addition, as the Funeral Monitor‘s discussion of the new plan tells us, “The FTC will no longer publicize the names of funeral homes accused of violating the rule. Funeral homes that violate the rule will be able to avoid a complaint filed in federal court, as well as an injunction against the funeral home and owner. And to top it off, violators will receive an emblem telling consumers that the establishment is a program participant and has voluntarily agreed to comply with the provisions of the Funeral Rule.” So much for progress.

I have only had a few moments in life where I have been deathly conscious of being a white person. The first time I can remember having that sensation was when I went to Howard University to do research, and the only other white person I saw was the archivist. But here I am having it again. I have spent the day at a black funeral parlor in Virginia—one that, I am told, has been owned by the same family “forever.” The American Way of Death Revisited inspired me to take a short tour of those funeral parlors Mitford ignores: African-American funeral homes.

Mitford tells the reader at the beginning that she is treating only the mainstream of American funeral practices. “I have not included atypical funerals: quaint death customs still practiced by certain Indian tribes, the rites accorded the Gypsy kings and queens, the New Orleans jazz funerals. … I have regretfully avoided these byways, intriguing though they are, for the main highway—the ‘average,’ ‘typical’ American funerary practices.” Disappointingly, though, her “typical” funeral parlors seem to be exclusively white, as do her “average” dead and bereaved. A portrait of African-American funeral parlors and undertakers would present a different picture of the funeral industry.

Not that black undertakers never indulge in the underhanded and mercenary tactics that Mitford describes. I visited half a dozen black funeral parlors in the South, and in the offices of every one I saw on display the industry magazines that teach funeral directors how to jack up cremation prices and rip off casket customers.

That having been said, historically the funeral parlor has played a much different role in African-American communities than in white America. The undertaker has held the same privileged role in black communities as ministers and teachers. “You know, blacks built up these funeral parlors during Reconstruction, just as soon as we had the churches and schools built. Took a lot of doing for people just out of slavery who were working for pitiful wages, but we built them. Like Hawthorne said,” a black funeral director, who had The Scarlet Letter squeezed into his overflowing bookshelf between copies of Their Eyes Were Watching God and Winesburg, Ohio, told me, “a community’s got to build itself a graveyard. You’re all going to die sometime, and you’ve got to take care of your own.” That the modern-day funeral parlor didn’t exist in the 1870s is of little consequence; that an African-American undertaker would link black-owned funeral homes to the schools and churches built in Reconstruction is itself a testimony to the importance of undertakers and funeral parlors in African-American communities.

For black Americans, funeral parlors have often been a locus of community life second only to the church.

For white folks, funeral parlors are rather peripheral; you go there when someone has died, and then you leave once the burial is taken care of. For black Americans—in particular, black Southerners—funeral parlors have often been a locus of black community life second only to the church. During the Civil Rights movement, for example, small groups of black leadership would sometimes meet in the funeral parlors, and black undertakers contributed critical financial support to black grassroots organizations. In the same county in Maryland where my friend is getting rich off the families of his deceased congregants, there is a playground in an African-American neighborhood that was built largely through the contributions of the black funeral parlor. If there are black undertakers out to gouge their customers, there are also black funeral workers who view their work as being not about private gain but about contributing to the community.

Some of the funeral parlors I visited were historically black institutions and are still owned by black families, but they now do “equal business with whites and blacks,” as one black undertaker told me. “See that stack of Jewish calendars over there? We have hundreds of those printed up every year, and you know we aren’t distributing those to black folks.” But the funeral home in Virginia still serves mainly black folks, and as I sit conspicuously in a corner, I see black women float in and out all day. It is clear that most of them have not come about a burial. One woman tells me she is there to organize a meeting for getting out the vote in the forthcoming election. The Clinton scandal has permeated even this sanctum sanctorum: “All the commentators are saying Democrats are going to stay home, that it’s a mid term election, and people are fed up with Clinton,” Vivian tells me as she bustles back out of the funeral parlor. “But black Democrats are not going to stay home.” Another woman comes to talk to the undertaker about donating something to a church auction. What will he donate? I wonder. Free embalming? An extra Bible verse engraved in your headstone gratis? But the undertaker is disappointingly prosaic—he donates a gourmet dinner cooked at the highest bidder’s home. One woman does come in to look at caskets—the inexpensive ones, I note, are displayed next to the pricier models.

If you don’t know of any black funeral parlors to patronize, you could move to Milford, Michigan, where the poet Thomas Lynch is the undertaker. I was unable to make it up to Michigan on my tour, so I had to settle for dipping into Lynch’s 1997 book The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which should be required reading for anyone who reads The American Way of Death Revisited.

In the first page of his lyrical account of deaths and burials, Lynch lets you know about money: “In a good year the gross is close to a million, five percent of which we hope to call profit. I am the only undertaker in this town. I have a corner on the market.” After that, Lynch leaves aside the business of selling to talk instead about the business of assisting people grieve.

As he describes the calling of an undertaker, it seems to be less about hustling and more about midwifery, “less to do with what was done to the dead and more to do with what the living did about the fact that people died.” It is hard to grasp that Lynch is a member of the same profession that Mitford describes. “[T]his is the central fact of my business,” Lynch writes, “that there is nothing, once you are dead, that can be done to you or for you or about you that will do you any good or harm.”

If your parents live in Milford, rest assured that when you go to bury them, the local undertaker will not try to sell you an overpriced coffin by explaining that your mother will spend eternity in sublime comfort if only you swathe her in lime-green satin.

There are, of course, alternatives to funeral homes. Although Mitford devotes only three pages in her book to the practice of handling a burial yourself, sans undertaker, it is a growing practice, and advocates of self-directed funerals speak passionately on the benefits of skipping the funeral parlor altogether.

June, a 30-year-old public school teacher, handled her father’s burial herself, without involving an undertaker. When her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, a friend of June’s gave her a well-read copy of Carlson’s Caring for Your Own Dead, which is to self-directed funerals what The Moosewood Cookbook is to vegetarian cuisine. When her husband committed suicide, Carlson decided to skip dealing with funeral parlors and undertakers because she was broke, but, as she argues eloquently in her book, there were unexpected therapeutic benefits to handling things herself. “I felt a strong need to express my love and caring for John even in death,” she wrote.

June was sold on the idea and was able to talk to her father about it before he died. “I wouldn’t have done it any other way,” she told me when I called her at her home in upstate New York. “But,” she added laughing, “I am also a devotee of Diet for a Small Planet and all of Helen and Scott Nearing’s books. I know there may be some people who would think that having to deal with all the details of the burial or cremation would be a burden, not a blessing.” Those details—from transporting the body to building a casket or removing a pacemaker (a prerequisite for cremation, and, Carlson assures us, really quite simple to do)—can seem daunting, but those who have gone through it themselves say that dealing with those details helped them get through the grieving process.

“I’ve had friends who have said to me that the only thing that kept them together after their parents died was that they had to get on the phone and call a bunch of relatives, that they had to cut up a brunch of cucumber sandwiches to feed people after the funeral, that they had to select a casket and track down a minister,” said June. “Handling my father’s burial myself was like that, only more so. I was really involved. There was no intermediary, trying to explain to me the benefits of satin lining for motives that I’m sure had to do with something other than my own best interest, and my father’s best interest.”

I went to a funeral the day after Labor Day. The minister made much of the timing in his eulogy. My friend’s father, who had died of leukemia, had been a construction worker. His wife was a waitress. My friend was thinking about taking a year off from her doctoral program so that she could work and give some money to her mother.

“The medical costs while he was sick just got really high,” she explained to me, “even with insurance. The insurance didn’t cover the hospice. I think my mother’s in some real debt now. I don’t know what else to do.”

Throughout the funeral, I couldn’t help wondering how much deeper in debt this funeral had put Mrs. North. As I was walking back to my car, I heard a little boy say to his father, “What happens to you after you die?” It was a relief to realize that he was asking about something that transcended casket choices and the rising cost of cremation.

Lauren F. Winner is Kellett Scholar at Cambridge University. This summer she will join the staffs of Christianity Today and in a writing residency made possible by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Today’s young adults, torn loose from their moorings by accelerated social change, rapid globalization, and the constant novelty of the entertainment culture, are searching for meaning and intimacy. Some of them wonder if the faith that worked for their parents’ generation will work for them as well. And when they ask, parents rejoice.

In the summer of 1996, Jana Novak, daughter of Catholic lay theologian and political philosopher Michael Novak, faxed her father 14 religious questions, ranging from sex (“Is it really solely for procreation?”) to science (“Can you be an evolutionist … and still be Christian?”) and not forgetting the Bible, Buddhism, and birth control.

“A father dreams of this,” Michael Novak writes; Jana “does not like to be told anything she can figure out for herself, which has sometimes left me out of it and not a little perplexed.”

The result of Jana’s inquiring mind and Michael’s fatherly eagerness is Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God. While the elder Novak has written the preponderance of the book’s words, its subtitle makes the exchange sound more one-sided than it actually is. Jana is a tough-minded inquisitor, and she does not hesitate to tell her father when he begins to use her questions as pretexts to pontificate on his favorite topics. (Kudos to both the authors and the editors for leaving intact some of the cheekier exchanges and for letting us glimpse a real father-daughter dialogue and not a prettified catechism.)

Michael Novak is a traditional Catholic—but he is not a narrow or uninformed one. His definition of what Catholic means in the phrase Catholic church illustrates his breadth: “always learning, always opening itself to other cultures, trying to discern all the workings of God’s grace in the world.”

The elder Novak has opened himself to the wide variety of Christian traditions and seems in particular to have learned a great deal from evangelical Protestants. He explains to Jana:

The evangelical way insists upon a strict communal discipline under the Scriptures—with high emphasis upon certain nonnegotiable basics: salvation comes through faith alone, given in commitment to Jesus as one’s personal savior, after a confession of sins, with trust that by his atonement for our sins our sins are washed away. (We Catholics join them in these basic affirmations.) … Their belief in … individual conscience and direct access to God’s mercy (“the priesthood of all believers”), however, does not take away from them their communal sense of fidelity to the Scriptures . …Individual believers are not, in this sense, “Lone Rangers,” as some … would have you believe.

And later in the book he writes: “On your point about evangelicals, Jana, I too have noted the tenderness toward Jesus in [their] hymns and expressions … , which I wish Catholics would emulate. Evangelicals seem to stress so much more effectively a personal encounter between each of us and Jesus, as if we ourselves stood in the scenes described in Scripture.”

But however much the elder Novak appreciates evangelical emphases, he claims to need something else: “The philosophical turn of my own mind requires abstract reflection on the nature of God and the Logos; I need more than tenderness.” In addition to finding evangelical faith too bare of abstract reflection for his tastes, he differs with classical Protestants on purgatory, Scripture, conversion, and the extent of human depravity.

Nevertheless, he does not attempt to prettify Catholicism for his questioning daughter: “The Catholic Church may be the mother of all the other Christian churches … ,” he writes, “but in history she has been a difficult, often sinful, and problematic mother. Pride, selfishness, lust, every scarlet sin imaginable has wracked the church of Christ.” And later he echoes Saint Paul: “It’s a pretty lowly bunch God picked for his people.”

Michael Novak’s theology is characterized by his passionate commitment to truth, real truth, objective truth—not the mere personal, true-for-you-but-not-for-me truths so popular with his daughter’s generation. But what every clear-headed Christian will appreciate about this book is that the commitment to truth leads not to abstraction but to a person: “The reason that truth is characteristic of reality and/or of propositions is that there is an intelligent, loving Creator of all things, Who is the origin of all truths.” And later he writes that the Incarnation is “not just a ‘tenet.’ If you grasp its implications, and welcome Christ into your life according to his words, it will shatter what you were before.”

Throughout this volume, Michael Novak is talking to his daughter. And he knows that no matter how compellingly he articulates the things he believes, he has no guarantee that she will believe them as he does. “I remind myself,” he says, “that you will find your way, and that your real dialogue is not with me but with God.”

Saved from anxiety

Venerable Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall (now about 70 years of age) has also written a book for his children and people like them: Why Christian? For Those on the Edge of Faith. Rather than engaging in a concrete dialogue with any one of his own four children, Hall has constructed a composite interlocutor: a genderless, faceless, undergraduate student stocked with questions asked by his students and his own children over the years. This approach lacks the immediacy of the Novaks’, but it allows the author to set his course without correction from a real-life dialogue partner.

Hall contrasts the religious sensibilities of today’s dechurched young Canadians with those of his own generation. His cohort was rebellious, fighting the church as part of the authority structures of society. Today’s youth, by contrast, are “far enough away from Christianity to be curious about it again” though “inherited Christianity is not reason enough to stay Christian.”

In the normal course of things, Hall would be classed as a liberal Protestant—Paul Tillich was one of mentors—and he writes with religion’s cultured despisers looking over his shoulder. Yet he bemoans the liberal/conservative split in contemporary Christianity and feels that there is a more biblical, more faithful third way. He refuses to “pursue the ultraliberal route of presenting Jesus as one among many revealers” of God, only “possibly the most important.”

Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His
Daughter’s Questions About God,
by Michael Novak and Jana Novak, Pocket
Books 321 pp.; $24.00.

Why Christian? For Those on the
Edge of Faith, by Douglas John Hall,
Fortress Press, 182 pp.; $15.00

What Christians Really Believe—and
Why, by Stanley J. Grenz, Westminster
John Knox Press, 159 pp.; $12.00

He stops short of saying that Jesus is God; yet he asserts that “Jesus ‘puts us in touch with God’ in a unique and decisive way.” He believes that despite the work of debunking scholars, the Gospels can tell us enough about Jesus for us to know enough about the God he reveals. Hall adds that we must interrogate that historical witness to Jesus because it helps us know who Jesus is not. “Nothing is more … offensive,” he writes, “than a ‘Jesus’ who is little more than the pathetic attempt of little minds to render their own pet theories and pursuits absolute!”

And by listening to the biblical witness, Hall tells his young listener, we discover that following Jesus is demanding. “God’s love comes with strings attached. It binds us to itself. It contains an inherent discipline,” he writes. “Discipleship is the discipline to which Jesus introduces those whom his love beckons. Following him is not less rigorous than the moralities from which he delivers us; it is more rigorous, because its essence is loving as one has been loved,” which loving “won’t be learned without suffering.”

Hall’s young listener is worried about life’s significance, about the possibility that our existence is purposeless, that perhaps we are superfluous. This, Hall proclaims, is the burden of our time. He declares that modern Westerners no longer worry about death (when was he last in a hospital or nursing-home ward?) or guilt. We are in desperate need of salvation, not from sin but from our anxieties over purposelessness and a sense of superfluousness: “There is no more horrendous scenario for the human future than one in which only a few human beings have any meaningful vocation,” Hall writes, focusing intently on North America, forgetting the Holocaust and today’s brutally resurgent tribalisms. Surely real sin and real guilt and real fears of death attend the terrors of ethnic cleansings.

Hall’s defense of Christianity mixes much truth with a sadly shrunken vision. What truths does he see? That salvation is not from our creatureliness. That the Incarnation is not just God showing us what God is like, but is God participating in our life. That the God of the Bible does not want to save us (merely) as individuals, but wants to save the whole creation. That faith is relational, a response to God’s faithfulness and not a mere conclusion of the mind. That we are all sinners because we are curved in on ourselves. That the church is necessary because the gospel is a message of reconciliation.

What does his shrunken vision distort? He believes, for example, that the “real impetus” for claiming that salvation comes exclusively through faith in Jesus is Western imperialism. That religion is always about power. That we are not sinners because we are bad. That salvation is not for an “otherworldly state.” That there is no standard pattern by which to live as a Christian.

If Hall’s readers take to heart his picture of Christianity, they will find a demanding vision of sacrificial love in community. But they will also have a too- small vision of the human predicament and a too-small God to save them from it.

A theology for Alanis Morissette

If Hall has been harking back to Tillich to understand his young friends’ anxieties, evangelical Baptist theologian Stanley Grenz has been listening to popular culture in order to understand who is influencing the seeking generation: Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne, Doug Coupland, Friends, and Kurt Cobain. (He also analyzes the messages of not-so-Gen-X culture: Star Trek and Star Wars and The Celestine Prophecy and Superman and Norman Mailer.) In response, Grenz offers a summary of Christian teaching crafted for just such seekers. And while What Christians Really Believe and Why addresses a mood more than an age cohort, the mood Grenz senses is very Gen-X.

Unlike the Tillichian Hall, Grenz does not imply that sin is merely whatever gets in the way of personal fulfillment. Sin is, in Grenz’s account, enmity against God. And the solution is not simply the God who empathizes with us in our weakness, but the God who saves through a sacrificial death on the cross.

Perhaps because it lacks an actual or even a composite dialogue partner, What Christians Really Believe and Why is less engaging than the other books considered here, but two distinctive contributions make Grenz’s book worth reading.

One is his treatment of the infiltration of monism into Western culture. Cyclical pre-Christian world-views rebirthed in the weirdnesses of Wicca; the vapid pantheism of philosophical Hinduism, now repackaged and marketed in The Celestine Prophecy and Star Wars; the nihilistic monism of Buddhism; the pagan psychology of Jung: When whirled in the blender of popular culture, Grenz says, these become the bearers of a “new immanentalism,” the belief that God (not the biblical God, but the Force) is not only with us, but he is us—and the old-growth forests and the living, breathing Earth. Of course, it can feel mighty good to be at one with the universe. But such good vibes offer no future. Grenz exposes the hopelessness and the helplessness and the resignation implicit in this immanentalism, and says, If you want hope or help, come to Christianity with its transcendent God who is directing history toward his own bright ends.

A second key notion is “life-in-community.” This is Grenz’s favorite subject (see his 1994 book Theology for the Community of God), and he rightly sees the longing for intimacy with God and with other people as a driving force of today’s seekers. He notes, for example, that “an entire generation is reaching adulthood without a sense of being connected to the traditional sources of relationship, such as strong family ties,” and that the intact-family sitcoms of the fifties have been replaced by dysfunctional-family programming (The Simpsons and Married … with Children) and nonfamily friendship networks (Seinfeld and Friends).

The danger of making community the highlight of theology is that it can easily horizontalize the Christian faith, turning it into one big group hug. But Grenz contrasts the accidental community envisioned in Friends, with its Gen-X apartment dwellers being there for each other, with the new community envisioned in Scripture. He refuses to reduce the search for belonging to the horizontal and retains an accent on God: our longing can only be met by communion with God, and the community to which we are called is formed by the Holy Spirit.

What baffles this reviewer is that in worship, in baptism, in the Eucharist, Grenz sees only human activity: In these acts of belonging, we declare our belonging and reaffirm our belonging. One needn’t revert to medieval sacramentalism to see the priority of God’s action in creating the new community continuing in the fundamental acts that sustain that community.

Grenz, like Hall and Novak, is engaging in apologetics, the branch of theology that explains and defends the faith to those outside it. A necessary part of apologetics is explaining where the truth being defended comes from and why it is reliable. Evangelicals, while acknowledging the role of tradition, experience, and reason, have always put the accent on the Bible when they explain why they believe what they believe about God. Grenz, who teaches at a prominent evangelical institution, is strangely silent on the Bible, yet he does not hesitate to turn to sociological theory: “Beliefs arise out of the community in which we participate,” he writes in his opening chapter, and in his chapter on community he writes:

We use borrowed categories to create the plot that gives us our sense of self. These categories come from the social groups … in which we participate . …Turning from self and toward God … involves the introduction of a new plot line into our personal story. We “borrow” the categories for this plot from the biblical story.

That vague borrowing of a biblical plot line for our lives is as close as Grenz gets to any statement about the authority of the Bible for Christian belief or life. His book is, of course, an attempt to address postmoderns, but it is curious that no attention is paid to the Christian account of how we know what we know about God. Fortunately, Grenz is clear that truth is truth because it is true. “Rightly understood, faith affirms that in some sense what I believe is true regardless of my affirming its truth.” And that is as it should be.

Taken together, these three books show that talking to young adults about the faith is a daunting apologetic task. Even today’s church-bred, church-raised young adults are as shaped by their peers and their culture as they are by churchly ways of thinking—perhaps more so.

The shape of that culture is a quest, a pilgrimage—but it is a quest without a Holy Grail and a pilgrimage without a Holy Land. With varying degrees of success, Hall, Novak, and Grenz tell these questers that the search can have meaning and that God is both on the road with us and at the end of the road ahead.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When Presbyterian missionaries began working in earnest in northwest India in the nineteenth century, they made the greatest headway among the poorest of the poor. As a result, most Christians in Pakistan, formed out of colonial India, are descendants of untouchables, families at the lowest level of the Hindu caste system. Very few Pakistani Muslims have ever converted to Christianity.

Most Pakistani Christians today still do the same work as their untouchable ancestors: sweeping the streets and doing other menial jobs deemed ritually or literally unclean by higher-caste Hindus.

DOUBLE DISCRIMINATION: In the serene capital city of Islamabad, Christians live in makeshift squatter settlements carefully hidden from public view, enjoying no property rights or legal access to electricity or drinking water, and under threat from a city relocation scheme. In February, a Christian community of 250 households in Islamabad received seven days’ notice to clear out.

Over tea in the cramped sitting room of a low-ceilinged, makeshift home, Iqbal S. Bhindar, chair of Building the Future Together, a Christian organization established to find alternatives for squatters such as himself, says the land on which they live belongs to the city government.

“They can clear us out any time,” Bhindar says. “They haven’t moved us out yet, but they haven’t given us any facilities, either.”

Aslam Ghouri, the group’s general secretary, adds, “They’ve been taking from us for years, and now they’re trying to kick us out.”

Pakistani Christians of all social classes endure an atmosphere of unending harassment and humiliation. “They call you names like sweeper,” says a Christian human-rights worker in Lahore. “So Christians are twice discriminated against, both for their religion and for the work they do.

“My mother says that when she was young, there wasn’t this Christian-Muslim problem. The majority of the Christians never migrated from India. This is our land. It is actually the Muslims who migrated.” When Pakistan was formed by partition from India in 1947, the country, whose name may be interpreted to mean land of the religiously pure, was designed to be a homeland for Muslims.

DEATH FOR BLASPHEMY? Although intense discrimination has made daily life traumatic for Christians, the enforcement of Pakistan’s blasphemy law has made being a Pakistani Christian potentially lethal.

Since October 1996, Ayub Masih, 35, has been jailed while appealing his conviction for blasphemy, which carries a mandatory death penalty.

In 1986, military dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, as part of his Islamization campaign, amended the blasphemy code to allow the courts to issue a death sentence against anyone who dishonored the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

Muslim extremists have aggressively used the tough code against Hindus, the Ahmadiyya (a heretical Muslim sect), and Christian untouchables, who make up a combined 3 percent of the country’s 141 million people.

“With these laws, any Muslim can easily bring a legal case against you,” Pakistani expert Cris Toffolo of the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, said recently to Presbyterian News Service. Cases are difficult to dismiss, because judges are often threatened.

Muslim mobs sometimes do not wait for court rulings and have killed two Christians after they were accused of blasphemy. Also, one judge was murdered in 1997 after he acquitted two Christian defendants of blasphemy.

Although the government has not actually carried out any executions, three other Christians have been convicted of blasphemy during this decade.

The blasphemy cases often originate in village-level rivalries, typically escalating until a Christian defendant faces disgrace and death or, at best, exile or a life in hiding.

In February 1995, a Lahore court sentenced 14-year-old Salamat Masih to hang, making headlines worldwide. Following the rumored direct intervention of then–Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, an appeals court overturned the verdict, and the teenager and his relative and codefendant, Rehmat Masih, were spirited away to exile in Germany.

Last year, on May 6, nine days after Ayub Masih’s death sentence was handed down, the Roman Catholic bishop of Faisalabad, Pakistan, arrived by car outside the Sahiwal District Court building, accompanied by his driver, Fr. Yaqoob Farooq.

Bishop John Joseph, 66, asked Farooq to show him the place where gunmen had reportedly fired at Ayub Masih the previous November as he entered the courthouse. The bishop then walked over to the spot, pulled out a pistol, and shot himself in the throat. By the time Farooq reached him, Joseph had died.

“In the bishop’s mind, the time had come when this law needed the attention of the world at large and especially of Pakistanis,” Joseph’s friend Cecil Chaudhry told Christianity Today. “He always said, ‘There will come a time when to get our rights in this country, we will have to start sacrificing lives. And I will be the first to sacrifice my life.’ “

Looking back, Chaudhry says there were signs that the bishop planned to take his own life. “I know that for this full week or more he was fasting and praying,” Chaudhry says.

CHRISTIAN PROTESTS: Joseph’s death sparked an outpouring of grief and outrage among Pakistan’s 1.9 million Christians (CT, June 15, 1998, p. 18). Tens of thousands demonstrated nationwide, carrying banners urging repeal of the blasphemy law and chanting slogans such as, “Bishop, your blood will bring a revolution!”

Muslim mobs responded in kind, attacking churches and Christian homes, leaving dozens of Christians injured and many more homeless. Though Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif expressed his condolences and urged Pakistanis to “show tolerance” for differing beliefs, his close political ally Ejaz ul-Haq told journalists: “Even if 100,000 Christians sacrifice their lives, the blasphemy law will not be repealed.”

Chaudhry acknowledges that the bishop’s tragic suicide did in fact galvanize Pakistan’s usually timid Christians and their allies: “The minorities combined together,” Chaudhry says. “The Hindus joined us, the Sikhs joined us, and soon after we had a joint minorities conference in Lahore. And it shook up the government for the first time, and they began talking in terms of looking into the blasphemy law.” However, in a few days, as India and Pakistan executed tests of nuclear bombs, reaction to the bishop’s death was overshadowed.

But regardless of how Pakistani Christians interpret the bishop’s suicide, many agree that it triggered an unprecedented response from Christian leaders around the globe. Last May, the World Council of Churches called for repeal of the blasphemy law, saying “religious minorities [are] under a state of siege.” Last August, Anglican bishops, meeting at the Lambeth conference, demanded that Pakistan release all prisoners “unjustly accused” of blasphemy. “The blasphemy law has paralyzed our community with fear,” said Anglican Bishop Azad Marshall of the Diocese of the Arabian Gulf in Pakistan.

RELIGIOUS APARTHEID: Despite the international protests, more Chris tians and other religious minorities have been charged with blasphemy and imprisoned since Joseph’s death.

Last November, Aslam Masih, a Christian shepherd and folk healer from a small town near Faisalabad, was beaten by a mob and stabbed in the back after being accused of desecrating the Qur’an. Authorities are holding him in prison, officially for his own safety. Also in November, two Christians were accused of blasphemy after a dispute with a Muslim neighbor. Their court case has made little progress. In some instances, defense attorneys will intentionally delay cases because they fear if the Christian defendant is released he will be assaulted or killed.

Many activists believe a principal problem for Pakistan’s Christians and other religious minorities is an unfair election system that limits the representation of minorities in Pakistan’s National Assembly.

Joseph Francis of the Center for Legal Aid, Assistance, and Settlement (CLAAS), a human-rights group in Lahore, says, “We consider it the main root cause” of persecution.

Zia, in addition to toughening the blasphemy law in the 1980s, made far-reaching changes in Pakistan’s constitution and electoral system, carving the country’s population into five groups according to religion. Out of 217 seats in Pakistan’s lower house or National Assembly, Zia reserved 207 exclusively for Muslim voters and candidates.

The remaining ten seats he divided up among the country’s four main religious minorities: Christians and Hindus each received four reserved seats; Parsees and Ahmadis, one each.

“This has been the mother of all evils,” asserts Chaudhry. “It’s religious apartheid. All misuse of the other discriminatory laws is stemming from the separate electorate system, because the minorities have been marginalized.”

Saleem Sylvester, managing editor of Christian Times, a monthly Urdu-language magazine, says, “We don’t have any legal or constitutional protection for the minorities.” Sylvester is fighting to keep from being evicted from his home on the grounds of the now government-run Forman Christian College in Lahore. Many Christian schools have been nationalized during the past 30 years.

The structure of the electoral system makes it difficult, if not impossible, for religious minorities to pressure the government for legislative change. The four Christian members of the National Assembly, for example, represent all Christians nationwide at large. If a Christian is falsely accused of blasphemy, no politician, either Muslim or Christian, has sufficient incentive to take up his cause. In addition, the Christian members of the Assembly most often are from the Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and home to the vast majority of its Christians.

CHRISTIANITY TARGETED? Some Christian leaders believe Pakistani Christians and Christians overseas have not responded appropriately to the threat posed by the blasphemy law. “This whole issue of blasphemy has been misconstrued in the West,” says Dominic Moghal, director of the Rawalpindi-based Christian Study Center, an institute established in 1968 to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue.

“The blasphemy law was not targeting Christians; it was targeting Ahmadiyya.” The Ahmadis are despised by Muslims for their belief that Muhammad was not Islam’s final prophet.

Moghal says some Pakistani Christians welcomed separate electorates and are now paying the price for their “cantonment” theology. “If you are trying to build dialogue, if you accept Muslims as fellow human beings, if you respect their religion while not losing your own, then blasphemy is not a problem,” Moghal says. “We have not been taught to love our neighbors; we’ve been taught to hate our neighbors.”

Moghal says some pastors have denigrated Islam “in order to raise Christ.” He calls on Pakistani Christians to “go be part of the broader political life of the people.”

Other Christian leaders believe the intense focus on the blasphemy law and the constitution’s limits on Christians has been a great distraction for the church.

“I don’t even talk about it in the West because there’s no way you can begin to explain it,” says a missionary with several decades’ experience in Pakistan. “I don’t think you understand the blasphemy law unless you understand the laws that govern the culture. The law isn’t what’s the problem. The thing is very complex because of the deep, deep feelings of the average Muslim.”

Last November, for example, when a Christian self-styled faith healer and several members of his family had been murdered outside the city of Peshawar, the story spread quickly in the West via e-mail networks that the killings resulted from Muslims persecuting Christians (CT, Jan. 11, 1999, p. 25).

Former Prime Minister Bhutto, in a bid to embarrass her rival Sharif, quickly denounced the killings as religiously motivated. But later investigation showed the murders most likely stemmed from a family feud.

“These stories that are going to the West, they just want to blame the government,” says Daniel Shakir, a local Pentecostal pastor in Pakistan. “But the government has nothing to do with this. It is a very local incident.”

With the sharp focus on religious persecution globally, some ministries have difficulty in developing interest in worthy outreach efforts. “We try to get the West to be interested in things that are happening in Pakistan,” notes the head of a Christian nongovernmental organization based in Peshawar. “We should be happy, but they are getting interested in the wrong thing. And this can actually backfire.”

“What concerns me most,” says another Westerner, “is that there’s this anti-Muslim feeling in America, and that’s sad, because Muslims are people too, and they need love just like anyone. Nothing’s going to be achieved by hate and prejudice. The church and Christians should be esteeming truth.”

A Western pastor expresses dismay at recent news coverage of Pakistan and its blasphemy law. He says, “Yes, there is intolerance. But there are beautiful instances of kindness between Muslims and Christians.” He cites the spontaneous hospitality and concern Muslim friends offered him and others last August when U.S. bombing raids on neighboring Afghanistan caused a wave of anti-Western feeling in Pakistan.

BRINGING GOD TO THE PEOPLE: Few missions workers and Pakistani Christians take time to dwell on their adversities. Rather, most of them concentrate on opportunities for ministry. Eiga Francis of CLAAS says, “There isn’t any other option. We make the future, and I am quite optimistic that we will make a change.”

Pakistani Christians have found some groups and individuals that are worse off than those who are untouchable: Afghan refugees. Babur Samsoon of the Christian organization Shelter Now International (SNI) is cheerfully confident despite working in the dry, barren Akorra Khattak Afghan refugee camp outside Peshawar. “My mission is not to preach. My mission is to present God to people.”

According to Samsoon and others, the outside world’s interest in Afghan refugees has plummeted since the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan in 1989—and aid money has plunged correspondingly. “As long as the Russians were in Afghanistan, there was a lot of support from the West,” says the director of sni’s Peshawar office, Georg Taubmann, a German national.

“As soon as the Russians left, it just dropped.” In 1994, the United Nations cut off aid. “That’s when SNI came in, feeding 2,000 people every day” and—with the help of refugees themselves—”building 2,800 mud houses,” Taubmann says.

A Christian relief agency director in Peshawar says, “If it were not for the Christian groups, they would get nothing.” The refugee problem is getting worse since neighboring Iran is forcing out some of its Afghan refugees.

Rupert Colville, the outgoing UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Islamabad, concedes, “The biggest problem we’re facing is financial. Afghanistan is becoming much less attractive to donor countries. At the end of last year, we actually ran out of money, and we took a step that we’re not supposed to take, of going into debt.”

Faced with decreasing interest in Afghan refugees among Western donors, Pakistani and Western Christians in Peshawar focus on the basics of food and housing.

“When we came here, people were against SNI,” Samsoon says. “They said we were very bad, that we were converting people and this and that. But now you see they are very friendly.”

Samsoon notes, “If you want to work in a community, you have to take people into your confidence. Get them to trust you, sit and chat with them.”

SIGNS OF HOPE? Still, a handful of religious freedom and human-rights activists persist in their efforts against the blasphemy law. Aziz Siddiqui, joint director of the Lahore-based Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, looks back over the more than one-dozen blasphemy cases against Christians since 1991. He says, “Thanks to the resistance, things have not been as bad as I feared. The pressure has had an effect.”

Within Pakistan, some leaders are pushing for further steps in implementing shari’a law, based on the Qur’an. In the town of Timergarah in the cold mountain valleys of Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas, Maulana Sufi Mohammed, head of the Movement for the Enforcement of Shari’a, is agitating for a return to stricter enforcement measures. “All the political parties in this area support shari’a. If they reject it, they are infidels,” Mohammed told CT.

Despite the hostile attitude of some extremists, there is evidence that the Pakistani government is reawakening to the value of Christian institutions, especially schools.

Last summer, the government returned to the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan ten of its schools, nationalized in 1972. For three years, David Stoner, an American Presbyterian, pressed government officials for exclusive management rights.

Last fall, five of the schools, with 2,500 students, reopened under local Presbyterian leadership after $100,000 in renovations. Zeb Zaman, education board chair, told Presbyterian News Service, “We are united in the belief that quality education that testifies to our faith in the value of each child of God must be the number-one objective of the Christian community.” About 62 percent of Pakistanis, age 15 and older, cannot read or write. Thus, schools run by Christians provide a great opportunity for churches and a service to the country. The return of the schools has boosted self-esteem of Pakistani Christians. Stoner says not to expect short-term growth for the church. “But,” Stoner observes, “we’re not in it for the short term.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Q:In what language was the Bible Jesus read?

-Frederica Matthewes-GreenBaltimore, Maryland

A: If, as most scholars today believe, Jesus spoke primarily in Aramaic, though he sometimes might have also used Greek and perhaps even Hebrew, what Bible was he likely to have read and heard read in the synagogue? The answer is that he likely heard Scripture read in Hebrew and occasionally in Greek, and then paraphrased and interpreted in Aramaic. How much of this paraphrase was actually written down in Jesus' day is difficult to tell. It is probably safer to assume that most of this Aramaic tradition circulated orally and only generations later was committed to writing.

The Dead Sea Scrolls—a collection of biblical and other texts from around the first century—have shown that our Old Testament existed in several forms at the time of Jesus. There could have been as many as four Hebrew-language versions: one that lies behind the Hebrew text of the Bible that Christians and Jews use today (the Masoretic Text); a second that lies behind the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which is called the Septuagint, or LXX (and is the Old Testament of the Orthodox churches today); a third distinctive Hebrew version of the Pentateuch (the first five books of our Old Testament) used by the Samaritans; and a fourth version scholars did not know existed until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls 50 years ago.

In addition, the discovery of Greek manuscripts and inscriptions have also led scholars to believe not only that Greek translations of the Old Testament, such as the LXX, were available, but that Greek was widely spoken in Palestine, even among Jews. The one time we are told that Jesus himself read Scripture in the synagogue, the text he read followed the LXX (see Luke 4:16–19). To make matters more complicated, Aramaic paraphrases of Scripture (called Targums) have also been found. Because of these and other literary texts from late antiquity, scholars believe Aramaic was also widely spoken in Palestine. Aramaic words in Jesus' sayings, such as boanerges, ephphatha, talitha qumi, and eloi eloi lama sabachthani, have survived in the Greek Gospels.

Further evidence for this can be seen in the fact that when Jesus alludes to Scriptures in the Gospels, he usually does so in a manner that agrees with the Aramaic Targum, not the Greek or Hebrew versions. Some examples: In Mark 9:42 –50, Jesus warns of judgment by speaking of Gehenna and alluding to Isaiah 66:24, "where their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched." The word Gehenna does not appear in the Hebrew or Greek, but only in the Aramaic. In Matthew 26:52, Jesus commands his disciple to put away his sword, "for all those who take the sword, by the sword they will perish." These words, which aren't in our Hebrew-based Isaiah, probably allude to the Aramaic paraphrase of Isaiah 50:11: "all you who take a sword … go fall … on the sword which you have taken!" Jesus' well-known saying "Be merciful as your Father is merciful" (Luke 6:36) reflects the Aramaic expansion of Leviticus 22:28: "My people, children of Israel, as our Father is merciful in heaven, so shall you be merciful on earth." And Jesus' very proclamation of the gospel, namely, that the kingdom of God has come (Mark 1:14–15), probably reflects the Aramaic paraphrasing of passages such as Isaiah 40:9 and 52:7. In these Aramaic paraphrases we find the distinctive words "The kingdom of your God is revealed!"

Understanding the usage of Aramaic in Jesus' time explains another often puzzling passage. In the parable of the wicked vineyard tenants (Mark 12:1–12), Jesus alludes to Isaiah 5:1–7. In the Hebrew version of Isaiah (on which our English translations are based), the people of Judah as a whole (and not their leaders) are condemned as guilty of bloodshed. But when Jesus told the parable, the ruling priests understood that Jesus had told the parable "against them." This is because Jesus applies the passage in his parable in a way that reflects the Aramaic Targum's interpretation of it, in which God's judgment is directed primarily against the temple establishment. (The tower of Isaiah's parable is understood as the temple, and the wine vat is understood as the altar.)

What does the knowledge that Jesus used different versions of Scripture mean for us today? For one, it can be taken as an endorsem*nt of Bible translations—we do not all have to learn Hebrew or Greek to read the Bible. It also points to a dynamic quality in God's revealed Word that allows it to invade every culture and tongue with the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. And what is just as important, it reminds us that we cannot truly hope to understand the New Testament without reading the same Scriptures Jesus did, and with the same expectation of encountering God in them.

By Craig A. Evans, professor of biblical studies at Trinity Western University in British Columbia, Canada.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

We Look for Better Things

Remember—Christianity proposes not to extinguish our natural desires. It promises to bring the desires under just control and direct them to their true object. In the case of both riches and of honor, it maintains the consistency of its character. But Christianity commands us not to set our hearts on earthly treasures. It reminds us that “we have in heaven a better and more enduring substance” than this world can bestow (Heb. 10:34).

—William Wilberforce inReal Christianity

Learning to Pray

Prayer is a form of communication between God and man and man and God. It is of the essence of communication between persons that they should talk with each other from the same basic agenda. Wherever this is not done, communication tends to break down. If, however, an atmosphere of trust can be maintained, then one learns how to wait and be still. It is instructive to examine the prayer life of the Master from this point of view. I am always impressed by the fact that it is recorded that the only thing that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to do was to pray.

—Howard Thurman inA Strange Freedom

Mirror Needed

The human race is inquisitive about other people’s lives, but negligent to correct their own.

—Saint Augustine of Hippo inConfessions

Uneasy Partner

Non-Christians will insist that we should keep our religion out of the way of their politics. But the reason for that is not that Jesus has nothing to do with the public realm; it is that they want nothing to do with Jesus as Lord.

—John Howard Yoder inThe Death Penalty Debate

Whose Worship?

The reform that the church needs most is for each worshiper to approach the service (of whatever style) with the proper mindset: worship. No one should enter with the attitude, “Amuse me, since if you’re not up to snuff, I’m not coming back.” … When we design a service to worship the Lord, the most important, and the most difficult, thing to accomplish is to be sure that we are, in fact, worshipping the Creator and not ourselves.

—Jean Harmon, quoted inContext (Feb. 1, 1999)

To the Master Musician

Tune me, O Lord,into one harmonyWith thee, one fullresponsive vibrant chord;Unto thy praise, all loveand melody,Tune me, O Lord.

—Christina Rosetti inMusic Is Your Forte

Channels Only

You are not the oil, you are not the air—merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as a lens does.

—Dag Hammerskjold inMarkings

Blessed Are the Merciful

Those who live by mercy will always be disposed to practise mercy, especially to a human being which is so dependent on the mercy of others as the unborn child.

—Karl Barth inChurch Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation (III:4)

When Sight Is Gone

Remember it is the very time for faith to work when sight ceases. The greater the difficulties, the easier for faith; as long as there remain certain natural prospects, faith does not get on even as easily as where natural prospects fail.

—George Mueller, quoted inStreams in the Desert

Three Medicines

By contrition we are made clean, by compassion we are made ready, and by true longing we are made worthy. By these three medicines it behooveth that every soul should be healed.

—Juliana of Norwich inHeirlooms

The Great “Ought”

Congregations are not just places to be reminded of what one ought to do. They are spaces where “ought” is put in cosmic perspective.

—Nancy Tatom Ammerman inCongregation & Community

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In the wake of the impeachment trial, we were assailed by friends incredulous at the tone of hopefulness in our January column. The polls showed 80 percent of Americans thought the President committed perjury and obstruction of justice (not to mention adultery)—and it didn’t seem to matter. How can anyone believe there is enough moral fiber left for cultural renewal? What makes us believe Christians can turn things around in the next millennium?

Admittedly, the forces arrayed on the battlefield appear overwhelmingly against us. The cultural centers of power are firmly in the grip of secularists: from Washington to Hollywood, from the media to academia. Small wonder Christians often feel lonely and isolated.

But this assessment of the cultural battleground is misleading, for on our side of the lines is a power mightier than anything secularism can muster—the Spirit of him who brought Jesus Christ back from the dead. As we celebrate the Resurrection this month, let us remember that we wage a spiritual campaign with spiritual power.

I witnessed an example of this power recently when I visited Jester II, a wing of a Texas prison, run by Prison Fellowship. Prayers have replaced early-morning pushups, while group Bible studies have pre-empted evening MTV. The near-monastic atmosphere is especially surprising when you consider that most of the inmates who volunteer for the program are hard-core, repeat offenders.

I dropped in on a class on drug and alcohol prevention to hear one of the inmates say, “I’ve been in three therapy programs, and they don’t work, because I’m back in prison.” Then he added, “We’re not interested in therapy. We’re interested in transformation.” The room resounded with amens. The inmates are so grateful for the chance to work on spiritual solutions to their problems that some have even voluntarily turned down parole to stay in the program—something ordinarily unheard of.

But the most breathtaking moment in my visit came during a graduation ceremony for inmates who had completed the entire 18-month program. As an inmate approached me for his certificate, out of the corner of my eye I saw a tall, stately woman rise from her seat among the visitors. Her name was Mrs. Washington, and she swept to the front, wrapped her arms around the inmate, and declared to everyone, “This young man is my adopted son.”

The place was electrified. I saw hardened criminals and tough corrections officials with tears in their eyes, for they knew that this young man was behind bars for the murder of Mrs. Washington’s daughter.

Arriving at this moment had not been easy for either of them. Ron Flowers had maintained his innocence during 15 years in prison. Then he joined the Sycamore Tree project (a Prison Fellowship program that helps offenders to confess their wrongs and make restitution to their victims), and for the first time he admitted his crime and prayed that his victim’s family would forgive him.

On her side, every year of Ron’s sentence Mrs. Washington had written angry letters to the parole board, urging them to deny him parole. But the same week that Ron confessed, strangely, Mrs. Washington felt an overwhelming conviction that she was to forgive the man who had murdered her daughter. The next day, she wrote the board that she no longer opposed Ron’s parole. She then tracked Ron down to express her forgiveness.

Their tearful embrace at the graduation ceremony was the climax of a series of what can only be called miracles. Only the supernatural grace of God could bring together a murderer and his victim’s mother; only the resurrection power of Christ can create love where there once was hatred and revenge. I know that in my own power I could never have done what this woman did.

And if a miracle can happen in prison, it can happen anywhere. God’s power can penetrate the darkest corners of society bringing radical transformation. This is what we must never forget when we face the solid phalanx of a hostile culture. Like Elisha praying that his servant would see the invisible army of angels in their chariots of fire, we must pray to see that “those who are with us are more than those who are with them” (2 Kings 6:16).

Nor does the story of Mrs. Washington end with that dramatic reconciliation. A friend was so moved that he sent her a gift of $10,000. She promptly sent some of the money to Ron Flowers to get him started in his new life out of prison, and the rest she used to set up a scholarship in her daughter’s name at her church. Such generosity can only flow from a profound experience of God’s redeeming grace.

So do we have reason for hope as we stand at the dawn of a new millennium? Absolutely. The reason can be stated in three simple words: the empty tomb. Christ has overcome death and sin, and that same power is ours by faith.

We must overcome the temptation to despair. It’s true that the forces in the culture war are not evenly matched—for we have an army of angels on our side. And those who are with us will always be far more than those who are in the world.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Chuck Swindoll, popular radio preacher, prolific writer, and president of Dallas Theological Seminary, has founded what some church-growth experts are calling an “instant megachurch.”

“Preaching is my first love,” Swindoll told CT in explaining why he agreed to lead the new Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, a once-sleepy farm community north of Dallas.

The church already has 2,000 members and is growing each week. It began last-October when Swindoll started Wednesday night Bible classes in the club room of the Stonebriar Country Club, part of an upscale community.

“They had 200 people show up the first night,” says Swindoll’s aide, Emily Edwards. “That went to 400 the next week and doubled again the third week.”

The church has advertised only once, and the attendance jumped from 1,100 to 2,000, according to associate pastor Mark Dane, who is married to one of Swindoll’s daughters, Colleen. No more advertising is expected until the church moves into larger quarters.

Still, more and more congregants pour into the rented gymnasium of a community college where Swindoll holds two services each Sunday. They sit in white plastic lawn chairs that were bought in several trips to Wal-Mart.

“They love us at Wal-Mart,” says Edwards. “We just kept going back to buy more chairs. We’ve about cleaned them out.”

None of this is particularly new to Swindoll, 64. For 23 years he was pastor of the First Evangelical Free Church in Fullerton, California, which grew to 6,000 members under his leadership.

Preliminary ground preparation began this month on a 2,500-seat multipurpose building on 60 acres of prime real estate in Frisco. The $7 million project is just the beginning phase. Ultimately, several buildings, including a 6,000-seat sanctuary, are to be built on the site.

“God is at work here or this would not have happened,” says Swindoll, who identifies naturally with Texans: he was born in El Campo, 75 miles southwest of Houston.

Frisco Mayor Kathy Seei, who has seen the town grow from 6,000 to 27,000 in the past ten years, says the city has accelerated street projects to help the new megachurch. “You could have worse things happen to you than having 6,000 Christians coming to your city,” she says.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The Christian Coalition has announced a massive $21 million fundraising campaign aimed at recruiting a record number of conservatives to vote in the 2000 elections.

The aggressive campaign, called “21 Victory,” is the largest voter education effort in the organization’s history.

“There has been a lot of talk in the press that conservatives are ready to withdraw from the process we call democracy,” says founder Pat Robertson, who recently replaced Don Hodel as the organization’s president (CT, April 5, 1999, p. 15). “We at the Christian Coalition are far from quitting. … In fact, we have just begun the fight.”

The $21 million campaign will involve “cards, calls, guides, and rides,” says Christian Coalition spokes person Molly Clatworthy, referring to postcards, get-out-the-vote phone calls to constituents, voter guides, and rides to the polls. The coalition will also pay for radio commercials, state rallies, and increases in field staff, Clatworthy says.

The coalition expects to distribute an estimated 75 million voter guides in 2000 and aims to recruit 1.5 million grassroots activists to encourage voting, Robertson says. And for the first time, the Christian Coalition will post its voter guides on the Inter net. “We are coupling good old-fashioned shoe-leather politics and the latest technology with the hope of driving millions of voters to the polls,” says executive director Randy Tate. The coalition is asking 50,000 individuals to contribute $20 a month for the next 21 months to underwrite campaign costs. The group mailed more than half a million fund raising letters to constituents in early March.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

This summer, George Tiller’s late-term abortion facility in Wichita, Kansas, will have a new neighbor—and some business competition.

In an attempt to push the pro-life movement “beyond pro test to provision,” the nonprofit Choices Medical Clinic will provide crisis pregnancy counseling, adoption information, and prenatal care—all at no charge. Clinic organizers hope the building’s prime location on land purchased in 1993 by a pro-life group, next to Tiller’s nationally known business, will attract women who may be having second thoughts about terminating pregnancies.

The clinic is scheduled to open June 7, but the office already has been receiving about eight calls each day, according to executive director Tim Wiesner. “We’re filling a niche that hasn’t been filled before,” he says.

Wiesner, a former medical education manager at a local hospital, joined the clinic after watching a video of a live abortion.

In addition to one paid nurse, Choices Medical Clinic has recruited a volunteer staff of physicians, nurses, social workers, and counselors. Local churches are helping underwrite the anticipated $200,000 per year operating costs. The nonprofit is also seeking donations through ads in national publications.

Despite more than six weeks of protests at his abortion facility by Operation Rescue in 1991 and a shooting attempt on his life in 1993, Tiller’s business continues to thrive (CT, Oct. 27, 1997, p. 99). As one of just a few third-trimester abortionists in the country, Tiller attracts a na tional clientele.

Wiesner sees ministry potential in providing a choice for the women heading to Tiller: an option based on compassion, not profit.

“Our purpose is to save babies, but our goal is to save souls,” says Wiesner. The nonprofit is motivated by Jesus’ example of love, he says, adding that the clinic will also offer postabortion counseling for those they are unable to dissuade.

“We want them to know we will still be there for them afterwards,” he says. “It’s not the unforgivable sin.”

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In the first test case of a 1997 amendment to the constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) regarding sexual behavior, an ecclesiastical court ruled March 6 that the First Presbyterian Church of Stamford (Conn.) did not violate church law by electing an openly hom*osexual man to serve on its governing board.

Although congregants were aware that Wayne Osborne, 38, lived with another hom*osexual man in a “committed, loving relationship,” church witnesses at the trial said they could not prove that he engaged in a sexually promiscuous lifestyle.

The Permanent Judicial Com mission of the Southern New England Presbytery voted 4 to 1 that Osborne’s election did not violate the controversial amendment, which states that church leaders should practice fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman or chastity in singleness (CT, April 28, 1997, p. 83).

Church deacon Dan Sassi told CT that one elder has resigned over the issue and other church members are concerned over the direction the church is taking, but the controversy has prompted the congregation to study the issue and focus on prayer. Sassi says, “There’s ample room for everyone’s attitudes about this.” Two church members complained of Osborne’s election to the presbytery, saying the church knowingly disobeyed the Book of Order.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.