Page 4985 – Christianity Today (2024)

The founder of the modern hospice movement, Cicely Saunders, has made it possible for thousands to die with dignity.

The visitor to Saint Christopher’s Hospice, situated in a shady suburb in south London, first notices its unlikeness to a typical hospital. Rooms are filled with furniture purchased from a department store, not an institutional catalogue. Front windows frame a view of a park manicured in fine English tradition; rear windows overlook a flower garden and goldfish pond. Signs of life are everywhere: the staff gathers around a bedside singing “Happy Birthday,” artwork hangs from every blank wall space, and a patient’s co*cker spaniel is carried in for a visit.

Despite the homeyness, a cloud hangs over Saint Christopher’s, for the building is, in essence, a place where people come to die. Forty percent of its patients die within their first week.

Since opening Saint Christopher’s in 1967, Cicely Saunders—now Dame Cicely, after being so honored by Queen Elizabeth II—has made it possible for 15,000 people to die in the way they choose, without high-tech intervention and artificial postponements. The design of her 62-bed hospice incorporates everything she has learned about care for the dying. “Every person deserves a good death,” says Dame Cicely, and she devotes her boundless energy to providing that right for her patients.

Saunders rules her hospice not as Dame but as Queen, and her visits to the wards resemble royal visits to the colonies. Her physical presence itself is daunting: she is six-feet tall, and has the no-nonsense demeanor of a schoolmarm. She treats the patients with kindness and calls all the nurses by name, but woe to the staff member who slacks off, or who speaks up against her pet projects.

Saunders has spent her life fighting battles—against a skeptical medical profession and skeptical religious authorities, against a picky National Health Service and a cramping fund-raising budget—and has emerged from these battles triumphant, accustomed to the role of leader and not follower.

Saunders once said, “I’ll spend the first 100,000 years of the next life apologizing for the toes I stepped on in this one.” But Saint Christopher’s has learned to accommodate her sometimes imperious style nicely. Key staff tend to stay long-term, despite the emotional strain. And everyone agrees that Saunders has no peer when it comes to relating to patients. In minutes, her superb listening skills can gain her an intimacy with them usually reserved for old friends.

Dame Cicely’s influence has spread far beyond the grounds of Saint Christopher’s. The unique alchemy she has wrought from the two elements of faith and medicine has helped transform the Western approach to death and made the word hospice a commonplace in the English language. No one would have expected such accomplishments from a woman who spent her first four decades trying to figure out what to do with her life.

As an adolescent, Cicely thought of herself as an ugly duckling. Tall and gawky, she poured herself into pursuits of the mind, and she spent most of the time feeling lonely. Her studies lacked focus; at Oxford, she studied politics, philosophy, and economics. At the onset of World War II, ignoring nearly everyone’s advice, she left Oxford to study nursing in a course founded by Florence Nightingale.

Cicely’s university years proved decisive in two ways. First, she became a Christian there. After reading such notables as C. S. Lewis, William Temple, and Dorothy L. Sayers, she joined Lewis’s Socratic Society and met a group of evangelical Christians. On a summer retreat at a seaside village in Cornwall, she became a bubbly, enthusiastic convert, and soon afterward joined John Stott’s congregation in London. The second decisive act, leaving Oxford, set her life firmly on a medical track.

Nursing school was conducted in wartime conditions whose privations sometimes rivaled those at the front. Students slept in unheated barracks and met in unheated classrooms. “We would get up early to break the layer of ice that had formed over the water jugs we then used for our baths,” Saunders remembers. “And during air-raid blackouts, we performed ward rounds in the dark.” After four years of rigorous training, she was fully certified as a nurse, but along with her degree she got the strong recommendation to look for another, less physically demanding line of work. A series of physical ailments, especially a bad back, had caught up with her. In 1944 she found herself back at Oxford studying to become an “almoner,” a patient advocate much like an American medical social worker.

Finally, at age 29, Cicely took her first real job, as an almoner in a ward that specialized in cancer patients. One of her first patients was a refugee, a Polish Jew named David Tasma. She could not help breaking the rules about maintaining professional distance. She discussed religious faith with David, repeated the psalms she knew by heart, and stayed by his bedside until he died. Indeed, Cicely Saunders, the nurse, almoner, and evangelical Christian, fell in love with this dying, agnostic Jew. When David finally died, only she and his employer accompanied his coffin to the Jewish cemetery.

David’s death put yet another twist in Cicely’s circuitous career. She had seen close up how poorly modern medicine handled death. For the sake of a patient with a chance of recovery, a hospital would go to any lengths. But a patient without hope was an embarrassment, a shameful emblem of medicine’s failures. Doctors tended to avoid terminally ill patients, or spoke to them in platitudes and half-truths. In busy, crowded modern hospitals, terminal patients died very much alone.

By breaking the rules, Cicely had eased the process of death for David Tasma. He did not die alone, and neither did another Pole named Antoni a few years later. Strangely, Cicely fell in love with him, too. From David and Antoni she learned the fathomless depths of grief and the peculiar vantage point of the dying patient no nursing school could teach. She began to sense an inner tug, a vocation to spend her life among the terminally ill.

When she confided her thoughts to a trusted physician friend, his advice was blunt, “Go study medicine. It’s the doctors who desert the dying.” It made little sense for a woman already trained in two careers to start over in a third, but that was Cicely Saunders’s decision. At the age of 33, having never studied science, she enrolled in medical school, the oldest in her class by far and one of very few women. “She’ll be 90 before she qualifies,” she overheard one 18-year-old classmate whisper.

In medical school, the pattern of her zigzag life started to become clearer. Her Christian faith strengthened: she met every day for prayers at lunchtime, invited outside speakers to address fellow students, and even volunteered as a counselor in a Billy Graham crusade. Medical training, too, served her goal of working with the dying: an old family friend hired her as a research fellow to study pain in the terminally ill.

Saunders qualified as a doctor in 1957, at nearly 39 years of age. Two years later, while reading the devotional book Daily Light, she came across the familiar verse from Psalm 37, “Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” It struck her with the force of special revelation. It was time to act on her call.

After a full day of meditation in a chapel, she emerged to write up a prospectus on what had been taking shape in her mind for many years. She divided her thoughts into “The Need” and “The Scheme.” With that paper the modern hospice movement was born.

All who know her report that Dame Cicely has mellowed in the past few years. They credit not so much her advancing age—she is now 72—as they do Marian Bohusz-Szysko, “the third great Pole in my life.” This one she married, in 1980, after a 17-year courtship. She has since nursed him through five life-threatening illnesses and claims to be happier now than ever in her life. Caring for Marian has also brought Saint Christopher’s back into the center of Dame Cicely’s life. For a while she had been traveling the world as an outspoken opponent of euthanasia, and an enthusiastic ambassador for hospice.

The hospice movement had its genesis in Saunders’s original vision, as much a religious as a medical vision. At Saint Christopher’s, faith radiates everywhere—from the chapel that stretches half the length of the first floor, from the religious artwork hanging on the walls, and from the many staff members who have Christian convictions. Yet, from the beginning, Saunders determined to found her hospice movement on principles broad enough to attract people from a variety of faith perspectives, or none. “We suspected she wanted to produce death-bed conversions,” comments one British psychiatrist. “How wrong we were.”

“Years ago,” Saunders recalls, “I was asked the question at Yale, ‘Can hospice only be done with a Christian foundation?’ I remember thinking, ‘If I say yes, I will close doors and narrow the vision, when what I want to do is open doors.’ ” Saunders reckons that about half of modern hospices have a religious base.

That she has indeed opened doors is seen in the proliferation of the hospice movement. Saint Christopher’s has become a mother institution that trains nurses, doctors, and many others in the burgeoning field of “palliative medicine.” When it hosts an international conference, hospice representatives come from as many as 40 countries, including Turkey, Iceland, and Zimbabwe. In the United States, nearly 2,000 hospice programs have sprung up. (Many U.S. programs, following another model pioneered by Saint Christopher’s, rely on home visitation.)

As Cicely Saunders sees it, the community of the dying both receives and gives back benefits. Dying people need the comfort and strength of the church. But the church needs the community of the dying as well: to summon up eternal issues, to teach us to listen, to give ways of serving Christ by serving others in his name. “My own hospice vision,” she says, “is of a God who does not prevent the hard things that happen in this free and dangerous world but who instead shares them with us all.”

The hospice movement resurrects a theme from the Middle Ages, when the church counted care for the dying as one of the seven cardinal virtues, when saints would pen books on the “Art of Holy Dying” and talk about death as an act of completion and faith. “In one sense, every death is an outrage,” says Dame Cicely, who has seen many. “But surely some are better than others. Has a patient been reconciled with family members? With God or his or her own inner values? Is he or she surrounded by caring people? Suffering is only intolerable when nobody cares. We try to offer our patients safe conduct.”

On a Saturday morning in December, I look down from the window of my high-rise apartment in Printers’ Row, a quasi-renaissance neighborhood in the South Loop of Chicago. The temperature outside is zero. Vapors rise from every nook and cranny of the cityscape. The El train creaks and squeals more than usual as it slowly passes on its steel trestle. Pedestrians swaddled in heavy overcoats and scarves lean into the biting wind as they scurry for the warmth of their cars or condos.

To the left, I notice a few men on State Street who are not hurrying anywhere: they are merely standing on the corner, hands in pockets, some without hats, enduring the cold. They are homeless. What do they do on days like today?

All I know is that I’d rather be anywhere today than on Chicago’s frigid streets. But that is exactly where I am headed. I have volunteered to do something I never thought I’d do: stand outside and ring the bell for the Salvation Army. I’m scheduled for five hours—11 to 4. The big chill.

My first image of the Salvation Army comes from when I was six. Outside the entrance to Sears, during the Christmas season, stood a man wearing a uniform. He looked something like a policeman, but he rang a bell while people walked up and put money into a red bucket. Mom told me the money was to help people who didn’t have enough food to eat or clothes to wear. I had never met anyone like that, but I nevertheless enjoyed putting a quarter into the kettle.

As a teenager during the late sixties and early seventies, I, along with millions of other young Americans, developed a strong distaste for all things military—even things that sounded military. I had no idea who the holiday bell-ringers really were, but I certainly didn’t want to give my support to anyone whose name ended in army.

But over the years I have picked up scattered bits of information about the Salvation Army. Adolescent suspicion has been replaced by adult respect.

I learned that the Salvation Army is a Christian organization—a denomination, in fact—which, unlike (for example) the YMCA in this country, had never abandoned its evangelical roots. William Booth founded the group as an evangelistic street ministry in England in 1865. Fifteen years later, George Scott Railton invaded Battery Park in New York City with six “Hallelujah Lassies,” organized street meetings, and opened a storefront outreach in Brooklyn. The first kettles appeared in San Francisco in 1891, when Army Captain Joseph McFee raised funds to provide Christmas dinners for the families of shipwrecked seamen.

The Army’s unique mix of evangelism and social programs continued throughout this century, with evangelism remaining paramount. The Army still conducts weekly services (complete with invitations to receive Christ) at its community centers all over the country. While community centers act like churches, their distinctive mission is to meet the physical and spiritual needs of the poor and downtrodden.

All of these memories and reflections course through my head as I dress for my Salvation Army shift. I layer myself with two pair of long underwear, jeans, a turtleneck shirt, a heavy sweater, two pair of wool socks, insulated boots, lined gloves, a Gore-tex stocking cap, and finally a down jacket and hood. I can hardly move, but at least I’ll stay warm. I hope.

My assigned post is only ten blocks away, so I walk. Along the way I stop by a nearly bare third-floor office on Monroe Street to pick up my red kettle, sign, a red Salvation Army vest, and a bell. The man is kind and brief, issuing a few simple instructions and telling me when to return the kettle.

“Feel free to take a break whenever you need to, especially in this cold. Just take the kettle with you. And someone will stop by occasionally to make sure everything’s going OK.”

Back on the street, I notice another guy ringing and wave hello. “You from the accounting firm?” he asks. When I say no, he gives me a puzzled look.

A blinking sign over the bank informs me that the temperature has warmed up to 1. Bring out the bermudas. My corner is just outside the main entrance to Marshall Field’s department store at State and Washington Streets. All around the store, shivering shoppers cluster in front of the famous Christmas windows, looking at lavish scenes in which mechanical figurines of elves, Santas, children, animals, and Dickensian characters gesture and dance. Right next to the empty stand that marks my spot is a Salvation Army window, with Santa ringing a bell and children putting money in the red kettle. A perfect location.

A thin man in his fifties walks up and tells me he’s the supervisor for the Loop ringers. “You must be from the accounting firm,” he says.

I explain that I merely called in and volunteered to ring, and was told to go to this corner.

“That’s funny,” he says. “A big firm signed up to handle kettles today, and not a one of them has shown up.”

“How many ringers do you have altogether?”

On a typical day during the holiday season, he explains, 16 people work the Chicago Loop streets. Nine of them are paid a minimum wage by the Salvation Army; usually they come from one of the Army’s social-service programs or rehabilitation centers. The other seven, the Army hopes, are covered by volunteers—such as the ones who didn’t show up today. I notice that the kettles for paid workers are locked to the stands, while volunteers can remove and carry their own.

On a good day, the 16 downtown kettles can bring in $1,100 or more. I’m told that the corner I stand on is the most lucrative, sometimes grossing more than $200 in an eight-hour day. (The less-busy corners typically collect $65 each.) Counting the suburbs, as many as 175 people per day can be ringing bells in the Chicago area. Across the country, between 15,000 and 16,000 kettles come out for the holidays. Last year the kettles raised nearly $40 million nationwide, providing Christmas assistance to 6.5 million people and funds to continue the Army’s year-round programs.

When the supervisor leaves to check on the other kettles, I realize my time has come: I take a deep breath and start ringing. For some reason, I feel embarrassed. Maybe it’s because I’ve often felt funny when I passed a bell-ringer, thinking he was a street beggar or a member of a strange religious sect.

While I fret about my self-image and how I “come off” in public, a little girl of three or four walks up and drops some change in the kettle. The girl’s mother looks at me with a smile and says, “It was her idea.”

The surge of feeling I experience surprises me. When the next few contributors walk up, I find I can’t speak: They too are children. Perhaps children have the fewest inhibitions to overcome about giving. They don’t crossexamine their motives. They don’t really care how they appear to others, or worry about their social graces. But at this moment I am struck by their free and gracious spirit.

In a matter of minutes, I not only feel relaxed, but I actually begin to enjoy myself. I ring my bell to various cadences, alternating between ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding, and the more complex shave-and-a-haircut rhythm: ding-dinga-ding-ding, a-ding-ding. All the while throngs of vapor-breathing shoppers pass by, toting their children wrapped up like packages. Many of them—young and old, rich and poor—pause for a moment to drop a few coins or stuff a few bills into my bucket. Everyone is friendly, especially the children, and their warmth more than compensates for the bitter temperature.

I notice that many kids take the initiative to nudge their parents and say, “Can I put some money in?” Other times the parents pull out some change and hand it to the child to put in. I cannot help believing those parents are teaching their kids something positive about the value of giving.

Before long I am greeting people and joking with the children. Many of them are so tightly bound in coats and scarves that they look like mini-mummies: I see nothing but two little blue eyes.

“Hi in there!” I say. Some of them are shy, but many laugh and look right at me, unlike most of the adults.

One little girl of about seven walks up and asks, “Why are you standing here?”

“Well, I’m collecting money to give to people who can’t afford to have a nice Christmas, so they can have a nice Christmas, too.”

“You mean poor people?”

“That’s right—poor people.”

“OK,” she says, apparently satisfied, and puts in some change. “Here. Merry Christmas.”

It is shortly after noon. I’ve been here just an hour. On the sidewalk in front of me a TV cameraman appears, along with Lt. Colonel Gary L. Herndon, the divisional commander for the Metropolitan Chicago Division of the Salvation Army. A photo-op, I realize. Herndon, dressed in his Army uniform and a long overcoat, chats on-camera with the reporter while I jingle in the background. When the reporter leaves, Herndon greets me, and we talk for a few minutes.

“I just love doing this,” he says, referring to the many times he’s rung the bell. Throughout our conversation, whenever someone drops money in the kettle, he turns to them and says, “Merry Christmas—God bless you!” Though he has to leave for another appointment, I get the feeling that he’d be happy to hang out here on the corner all day, ringing his bell and mixing with the people.

I’ve gotten over my initial nervousness and moved into downright enjoyment. I hardly even notice the cold, though several passers-by indicate that my mustache is covered with ice. I keep zeroing in on the kids. When a group of them approaches, I call out, “OK, who wants to ring the bell?” Usually several of them jump up and down and yell, “I do! I do!” So I let them take turns, and then their parents give them something for the kettle. Many have trouble forcing the money into the slot because of their heavy mittens.

At one point I see the familiar face of my wife, Nancy, who brings a cup of hot coffee and a warm muffin, then hurries off to do a little shopping.

Before long I encounter some competition on my corner. An African-American youth in his late teens or early twenties plants a wooden crate on the sidewalk, then stands on it, absolutely still, holding out a paper cup. Not a single muscle of his body moves. At first people glance at him curiously, then walk on. But when someone dares to drop a coin in his cup, he clicks into a series of jerky, robotic motions, ending with a tip of his hat. Then he freezes again, cup extended, until the next customer.

Miffed that he might be stealing potential kettle contributors, I consider asking him to leave. But then I realize that he is actually slowing down the shoppers, perhaps even causing more of them to come my way. Perhaps there’s room on the sidewalk for both of us. Later in the afternoon, he decides to call it quits and picks up his crate to leave. When he passes me, I ask him how his take was. He merely shakes his head and turns away.

By 2 P.M. it has warmed up to 7 degrees. Activity on the streets has heated up as well. A guy hands out flyers promoting the latest movies out on video. A choir of nine well-scrubbed Christians sings carols and passes out tracts. A popcorn wagon opens close by, spreading its warm, buttery aroma, which only draws more people. Crowds are at their peak, and many of them chip in to my red kettle.

Virtually everyone is friendly. The closest thing I see to unfriendly comes from a pair of thirty-something women in fur coats. One of them says to the other, “Go on—put something in.” The other replies, “There you go, you want me to give money to every Tom, Dick, and Harry standing on the street! “Nevertheless, she shoves a bill into the slot indignantly, and they walk away.

Not many people speak to me, but the comments I receive vary widely:

“How many pairs of long underwear are you wearing?”

“Can you tell me how to get to the train station?”

“You know, I gave $75 to the Presbyterians last year. But I’m not really Presbyterian, I’m Unitarian. But it’s not what you believe that matters, it’s what you do.”

“You’re not from the accounting firm, are you?”

“Which bus do I take to the Museum of Science and Industry?”

“You’re sure brave to be out here today.”

When a dark-haired Italian woman puts in some money, I thank her and say, “Merry Christmas—keep warm!”

“Tell that to my brother,” she blurts out. “I get this call this morning, and he tells me he’s locked himself out of his apartment, and all he’s wearing is his pajama bottoms. So now I gotta pay the cab fare; I gotta get him a new key; I gotta get him back into his apartment again …” She keeps right on talking and waving her arms as she turns to leave.

One young woman marches up, aims an Instamatic camera at me, and fires. Then, without a word, she disappears.

Nance pops by again with more coffee, which I hope will warm my nose and fingertips. Otherwise I still feel comfortable. The supervisor checks in and tells me to knock off at 3:30 because of the cold. Thousands of people continue to choke the streets.

All day I have been watching for demographic patterns in those who give or don’t give, hoping for some telltale insight. But I detect no significant difference in giving by sex, race, or (apparent) economic status. All I notice is that children probably put the most money in—either on their own or prompted by their parents.

Oddly, no one ever asks me where the money goes—even though I have researched the answer. In Chicago, for instance, there is the Harbor Light Center, which provides shelter, medical and dental treatment, legal counsel, and psychiatric help for alcoholics. The Emergency Lodge serves as a haven for poor families suffering from violence, abuse, eviction, or other crises. Two adult rehabilitation centers sponsor a work-therapy program to help men without jobs regain their self-respect and sense of direction. The Front Line Feeding Program serves hundreds of thousands of hot meals to the hungry. Other programs assist prisoners, shut-ins, senior citizens, substance abusers, and the homeless. Children participate in Head Start, camp and music programs. And there are kids’ Christmas parties and gifts.

The Army’s goal is to help the poor and needy, both spiritually and physically. An evangelical—even evangelistic—gospel message accompanies virtually all of their outreaches. (In 1989, the Army recorded 115,325 decisions for Christ—45 percent through social service programs, and 55 percent through their community centers.)

As the shadows lengthen on the street, I glance at my watch and can hardly believe it’s already 3:30. I’m having such a good time that I don’t want to stop. And so many people are giving that I think, If I stay here 15 more minutes, that could mean another 15 or 20 dollars. But I decide to quit, since the kettle drop-off location will be closing soon.

Just before I leave, a tightly bundled boy of nine or ten walks up with a tattered plastic grocery bag. “Do you have any use for these?” he says, holding the bag open. Inside I see a teddy bear and a coloring book.

“You mean you want to give them to me?” I say, flustered. I don’t see the kid’s parents anywhere. And the supervisor hadn’t told me how to handle anything but money. I consider telling him thanks, but I can’t accept anything that won’t fit in the slot.

But then I think for a moment. “Thank you very much,” I say at last. “I’m sure I can find someone who would love these gifts. I’d be happy to take them.” The little boy smiles and strolls away.

I am the last one to arrive back at the office to drop everything off. The paid ringers sit on folding chairs around the perimeter of the room and smoke. The supervisor thanks me, sticks my kettle in a safe, and locks it. When I hand him the bear and the coloring book, he says, “Sure, we can use those—no problem.” Then everyone stands to leave.

Listening to the conversations in the elevator, I realize that these men aren’t going home to luxury high-rise dwellings. One of them says something about being an alcoholic. Another says he hopes the landlord had turned the heat back on in his building. It occurs to me that it is these people, and others in similar situations, that the money in my kettle goes to help.

As I head south on State Street, back to my cushy apartment, I once again pass those familiar homeless faces in my neighborhood. Perhaps the money I collected will help some of them, too. But then I think, Get serious, Verne-just how much of a difference are you going to make in these people’s lives with a few hours of bell-ringing?

Maybe none, at least not directly. But I have to believe that the bell-ringing of thousands of others like me all across the country will indeed make some kind of difference. Today I realize even a small step in the direction of helping those who really need help is better than no step at all.

In my four-and-a-half hours of ringing, I probably raised $150. But something else is raised, too: my own faith in human nature. After watching so many people, rich and poor, old and young, joyfully giving even the smallest amount of change to help the needy, I can’t help but think that in spite of all the materialism, decadence, and selfishness in the world, there remains in all of us at least a fragment of the image of a giving God. And it is that fragment that the Salvation Army appeals to, and nurtures, at Christmas and throughout the year.

Verne Becker is a writer, now living near New York City. He is the coauthor, with Thomas Stribling, of Love Broke Through (Zondervan).

2 Live Crew and Mapplethorpe’s photos may be legal now, but the fight for decency isn’t over.

Nineteen-ninety may well be remembered as the year when decadence duked it out with decency—and it looked like decadence might win. The champions of decency lost a few rounds as 2 Live Crew and the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe took refuge under the banner of Art, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) told producers of X-rated material they would no longer have to wear that scarlet letter.

After these losses, we are worried that indecency is becoming “decent” in the land. Our courts, Hollywood boardrooms, and fine-arts centers seem increasingly to favor freedom of expression over common decency—and common sense.

Defensible reasons can be found, of course, constitutional and otherwise, for 2 Live Crew to be acquitted, as it recently was, for obscenity charges. The groups’ lyrics are offensive, obnoxious, and misogynist, but the defense marshaled experts who claimed the rappers’ “nasty as they wanna be” grossness had artistic merit. The music, it was claimed, did more than appeal merely to prurient interests, a key factor in applying the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Much the same line of defense was successfully employed in Cincinnati, where a local jury acquitted the Contemporary Arts Center (and its director) of obscenity charges for exhibiting such Robert Mapplethorpe photographs as one of a man urinating into another’s mouth and of nude children with their genitals prominently featured. The label art, it seems, covers a multitude of sins. Especially when the prosecution fails to mount a persuasive alternate view.

But something more than legal definitions of obscenity is at work. We are witnessing an erosion of public standards, and a weakening of public will. Indeed, the pounding away on decency is not limited to the arena of the courtroom.

Witness the MPAA’s creation of the NC-17 rating for films that would otherwise wear an X (and face near-certain death at the box office). Movies once confined to back-street movie houses are now playing in the same shopping-mall theaters frequented by youngsters. In the “family” theaters of this country, Henry and June have moved in next door to Fantasia. It’s hard not to be cynical about the ratings system’s professed goal to serve parents when this decision promises a windfall to directors and distributors.

Things have not fared well, either, for those favoring National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) restrictions on the granting of public funds to artists. The hue and cry of censorship bedeviled the agency, and they quickly dropped a requirement that grant recipients pledge not to violate congressionally imposed obscenity restrictions. As of this writing, the only guideline facing the NEA is that grants are made “taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” Let’s just call it bureaucratic window dressing.

Unfortunately, in the new climate, talk of public scrutiny, moral sensitivity, or concern about young minds is in danger of being deemed the Philistinism of the “booboisie.” But we must not throw in the towel. Christians must unite in mounting a counteroffensive through our families, churches, schools, and other institutions. The legal issues surrounding public standards may be complex, but the moral imperatives are not. We must not abandon the ring of public debate to those who would use freedom of speech as an excuse to be as morally offensive as they “wanna” be.

By Timothy K. Jones.

Saddam Hussein is not the Messiah; but to hear some Christians talk, you’d think Baghdad’s reigning bully was the next best thing.

“It’s a time to rejoice for Christians,” said one television preacher, identifying the invasion of Kuwait as a precursor of Armageddon. “We’re going home.”

That evangelist may or may not be right in the way he ties Persian Gulf tensions into Bible prophecy; but the teaching of Scripture and the lessons of history should cause us to pause before making end-of-the-world predictions.

Such predictions can fuel a world-denying piety that wishes it were somewhere else than on the planet where God’s providence has placed us. Nineteenth-century Baptist lay preacher William Miller stirred up much apocalyptic fervor, using current events to predict Christ’s return. His message was not designed to transform the world, but to show people how to escape it. Although Miller later repented of his predictions, some of his followers formed an ongoing movement that shunned the world and promised escape.

Historians and social scientists who have studied Miller’s spiritual heirs note that this escape-hatch eschatology appeals largely to people from among the working class and the have-nots. We are not surprised. Assembly-line slaves are rarely at ease with the status quo. And escape-hatch eschatology has got one thing right: the second coming of Christ will liberate the oppressed. The prophecies of Revelation are primarily promises to the persecuted.

But the escape artists have one major item wrong: the new order to which “we’re going home” is not to be found on some gold-paved, bemansioned suburbia in the sky. The Bible looks forward to both the gradual and the cataclysmic transformation of this planet and its civilizations. The Scriptures consistently locate God’s throne in heaven, but believers, it seems, are destined to inhabit a renewed Earth.

In the “little apocalypse” of Mark 13, Jesus warned his disciples not to read wars, earthquakes, or famines as signs of the end, for “this must take place, but the end is not yet.… This is but the beginning of the sufferings” (vv. 7–8). The key words in Jesus’ address were not predict and postulate, but endure (v. 13) and stay awake (v. 37). Thus, when Jesus invited his followers to note certain cataclysmic events as signs of the end (vv. 24–29), he immediately cautioned them: “of that day or of that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (v. 32). Apparently, those who are convinced the Persian Gulf tensions are the threshold of Armageddon are better informed than the angels.

Escape-hatch eschatology, in addition to being unbiblical, can lead to two foreign-policy follies: First, it may tempt us to help bring on Armageddon (by arming one side in the conflict). Second, it may offer the opposite temptation, to think that foreign policy doesn’t matter since the Earth will be destroyed (leading us to ignore issues of justice and human rights).

Escape-hatch eschatology may also distort our piety, for the ethics of the Gospels are closely tied to the eschatology of the Gospels: Jesus’ announcement of God’s coming kingdom is inescapably bound to his teaching about the persons we ought to be. That proclamation drove his listeners to live by a rule of reconciliation—not retaliation. The desert dwellers at Qumran were, however, not unlike today’s Saddam-watchers, looking for war and predicting the End. They had an eschatology of doom, which issued in a compulsion to live right—so that when the Judgment came, they could say, Good-bye, cruel world.

All is not right with the world. Just as things were looking better and communism was collapsing, Saddam Hussein came along to remind us of that. He may be the last in a string of such reminders, or there may be many more. In a way, that doesn’t matter. What matters is whether we love the world God loves—or whether we’re eager to escape it.

By David Neff.

The great French novelist, Balzac, once referred to bureaucracy as “the giant power wielded by pigmies.” Maybe that explains why all those offices in Washington are so small. At any rate, tiny minds seemed to have been working overtime to stymie two projects that should be considered points of light.

In New York City, federal regulations requiring the installation of elevators in multi-story buildings forced Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity to abandon their work there among the homeless. Here is a case where it might have been better for the regulators to apply the spirit rather than the letter of the law. The very persons the regulations intended to protect ended up losing what they need most: respect and a chance to make it. In their appeal for an exemption, representatives from the order argued that it was their custom to carry the disabled over barriers, noting that the human touch reflected their high esteem for individuals. The bureaucrats relieved them of this burden, leaving the handicapped with the loss of yet another oasis of decency in a desert of rejection.

At least 117 similar havens for the downtrodden felt the bludgeon of bureaucracy when the Department of Labor told the Salvation Army to start paying minimum wages to participants in its work rehabilitation program. Never mind that the Salvation Army provides food, housing, and job training to the 70,000 men and women in this program. And never mind that without this program, most of those men and women would be dependent on welfare. Rules are rules.

We fully support the sound principles behind regulations to protect the handicapped, and we are thankful for generous minimum-wage standards. But when the application of any good law harms those who need its protection, something is wrong. In both cases, officials felt the loss of care for society’s unfortunate is a fair exchange for total compliance.

Not only is that not a fair exchange, it should be an intolerable one for all who care about the needy.

By Lyn Cryderman.

In its October 8 issue, CHRISTIANITY TODAY carried the story of Robertson McQuilkin, president of Columbia Bible College and Seminary. In that article, Robertson recounted the story of his wife’s gradual succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease.

When I read that article, I couldn’t keep back the flow of tears, as my heart ached for my friend and his beloved wife. (You’ll understand that if you have read it; and if you haven’t read it, you ought to.)

Early on, Robertson decided to resign his presidency of the flourishing college and seminary he had nourished for nearly two decades. He chose to care for his wife. It was his privilege and his duty. “Why?” you ask. Because he loved her, and she needed him. Had he not promised many wonderful years ago “to love her and care for her so long as we both shall live”?

But what about the schools and the thousands of young people who would be preparing at Columbia’s college and seminary for worldwide Christian ministries? Did they not have needs as well? But Robertson also believed in the sovereign God of the Bible. Though the need was great, others could be found to continue his work at the schools. Only he could serve his beloved wife, Muriel.

Conviction And Compassion

Thank God for a man like Robertson McQuilkin. I pray that every young woman who marries may find a husband like him, and that every young man who marries may prove to be that kind of husband. To be that kind of spouse takes certain virtues and disciplines. It demands both conviction and compassion, a balanced character. It requires both softness and firmness, a deep sensitivity and empathic power, on the one hand, and a rooted loyalty and resolute love, on the other.

Elsewhere in this issue, philosopher Peter Kreeft discusses spiritual warfare and points out that our ancestors were better at the “hard virtues” (like chastity and courage), while we seem to be better at the “soft virtues” (such as kindness and philanthropy). It seems that a long and enduring marriage makes the same demands as spiritual warfare: that we develop both hard and soft virtues. Such a balanced character does not happen apart from the ministry of God’s Spirit in our lives, and marriage itself is the classroom in which he chooses to teach us.

My Troth

But what if my wife gets Alzheimer’s disease? How would I cope with the conflicting demands of ministry and marriage?

Ruth has been my dearest and best friend for over 50 years. I, too, promised to honor her and care for her so long as we both shall live. I don’t know what the future holds. But if I am physically and mentally able and my wife will permit it, I know what I shall do. I shall love her and care for her till the end of my strength.

I do not speak for others. Not everyone has the same circ*mstances. Many things make a difference: financial reserves, emotional capital, and the availability of family and friends. And as age exacts its toll on the more lucid partner, energies and optimism diminish, and his or her ability to cope with change and unexpected demands may falter.

Caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s is exhausting in the best of circ*mstances. I certainly would not wish to lay a guilt trip upon those who are led of God to meet the demands of life and the duties and privileges of love in a different way.

Yet I know what God would have me to do, should he lead Ruth and me down a path like that of Robertson and Muriel. For others whose love for spouse and duty to God are equally strong, I cannot say. I believe God could lead them to quite a different decision. Yet in a day when marriages are entered into lightly and jettisoned with what seems to be only momentary regret, we can unite in thanking God for Robertson and Muriel—and for the example of their love, one that is buttressed with bands of steel.

Start With Adults!

I appreciate and applaud Tim Stafford’s plea for a fresh look at the needs of children vis-à-vis Sunday school [“This Little Light of Mine,” Oct. 8]. However, a fundamental shift needs to take place in the way we view the business of Christian education before we can see any significant reversals in the decline of this venerable institution.

The place to start turning this sluggish beast around is not with children, but with adults. We have seen our Sunday school more than double in the last four to five years through an all-out focus on adults. We began by contributing to the “burial mound for unused Sunday school literature,” and, for the most part, we develop our own adult materials in house. Then we expanded classes to hours we were told adults wouldn’t attend, and they came.

A serious commitment to the ongoing development of adults through Christian education will build a solid base for a solid children’s Sunday school.

Robert Bayley, D.Min.

Central Presbyterian Church

Saint Louis, Mo.

I found it interesting that in the same week Time magazine featured a cover story titled “Do we care about our kids?” Tim Stafford concluded that we don’t. That seems hardly surprising in a country that spends a billion dollars every year killing off children before they see the light of day and imposes cruel and unusual punishments on those who try to stop the slaughter.

Tom Pittman

Spreckles, Calif.

The most important issue was not mentioned, and that is the lack of biblical and theological education for those who teach Sunday school. This education, in a strong academic level, has never been offered except on the college and seminary campus. By a dependable survey, only 10 percent of all who teach youth and adult Sunday school have had any biblical and theological education on the college level. Teachers have never been students!

We do not want our children in a school with untrained teachers during the week. What about on Sunday in Sunday “school”? Adults who will teach need to become students and then teachers.

Irvin E. Cole, President

American Association of

Theological Study Centers

Fallbrook, Calif.

No Cheers For Belt-Notchers

Hooray for Charles Colson for having the courage to speak out against politicians who make the execution of criminals some sort of belt-notching contest [“Voting for the Executioner,” Oct. 8], It is a terrible indictment against society and the church when we resort to solving the problem of violent crime in the same manner that violent criminals solve their problems. Is faith in the power of the gospel to change the heart just some empty platitude that we quote but don’t believe?

Kathryne McCullar

Hayesville, N.C.

Is Charles Colson’s vote against the public executioner a vote for the thousands of private executioners who wantonly slaughter people like pigs on the streets of our cities? And how does his vote fit with “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made He man” (Gen. 9:6)?

Rev. Don W. Hillis

Lanham, Md.

Emulating The Puritans

Thank you for the splendid, insightful article by J. I. Packer on the Puritans [“What the Puritans Taught Me,” Oct. 8]. Packer stated that “some ages have special messages for other ages.” If only the Western church, especially in North America, could see its shallowness and superficiality and begin to imitate the Puritans who “fought for truth against error, for personal holiness against temptations to sin, for ordered wisdom against chaotic folly, for church purity and national righteousness against corruption and hostility in both areas”!

P. Fredrick Fogle

Tallahassee, Fla.

The Milton Friedman School of Evangelism

One of the great combinations in Christendom is free enterprise and evangelism. And the best current example of this is the proliferation of jewelry, Bible covers, and T-shirts now on the market. What better way to share your faith than with a diamond-studded doodad that spells Jesus or with a T-shirt that redeems a beer slogan (“His blood’s for you!”)?

My only complaint is that we’ve barely tapped the market. Why not reclaim all of consumerism for Jesus. For starters, conscientious imbibers could uncork a bottle of Agua-Cana, the wine that turns into water (the real miracle could be explained on the label). On the soft-drink side, why not Israel-Lite?

With Lee Iacocca’s marketing savvy, I’m sure he could get his engineers to build the laser-fast Jehu.

Apple, Inc., brought out the Macintosh computer, and Commodore gave us the Amiga. Isn’t there a Christian entrepreneur who could slap the name Solomon onto a 386 machine?

Nintendo has been a big seller, especially at this time of the year. You’d think someone in the fold would offer some new game cartridges: Super Joseph’s Brothers, Wrestling Jacob, or Stoning Stephen.

Nike might want to consider a new line of water skis (River Jordans), while luggage manufacturers might want to diversify into the field of fitness with Samson Health Clubs.

And something tells me the name Methuselah would be a big draw for just about any business in Arizona or Florida.

Pet aficionados already have Noah’s Ark, and cookie lovers go ga-ga over Famous Amos. So it wouldn’t be too much of a jump to Wicker by Moses, Sarah’s Maternity Shops, or Zaccheus’s Tax Service.

Some may think this is nothing less than crass materialism, but if John Lennon could make a few million on Jude, what’s the harm in cashing in on a few earthly treasures ourselves? All for the sake of evangelism, of course.

EUTYCHUS

Two-Covenent Theology Tensions

I appreciated Ken Myers’s article “Adjusting Theology in the Shadow of Auschwitz” [Oct. 8]. While I am a mainline Lutheran pastor who enjoys the writings of modern post-Auschwitz theologians, I can still relate to some of the tension Myers points to in the Willowbank Declaration event. It’s a fine report.

The tension Myers seems to point toward is “How can Christianity maintain the integrity of its Christological imperative for salvation with genuine mission fervor, yet coexist with other world faiths (such as Judaism) without being called anti-Semitic or some sort of old-fashioned Christian imperialist).”

Evangelicals don’t seem to want to “come clean” on one question. That is “What do Christian theologians say to six million Jews who died for their faith, which was not centered on Jesus Christ as Savior?” I don’t think too many evangelicals wish to suggest that the six million Jews who suffered in death camps now suffer eternal damnation.

As I see it, the two-covenant theology that Myers and the Willowbank Declaration criticize is one attempt to come to grips with this awkwardness.

Willowbank’s Declaration and event may simply be the writing on the wall signifying that Christians who upheld an uncompromising traditional dogmatic theology of an ancient Christian Christology are in for rocky times ahead in face of world religions making their claims as legitimate expressions of worshiping God.

Rev. David Coffin

Trinity Lutheran Church

Malinta, Ohio

Thank you for allowing Myers to raise the question “Does the Holocaust change the context for Christian evangelization of the Jews?” I am personally grateful for his understanding of the issue. He has spoken the truth with loving insight.

I worked as the coordinator for the Willowbank Consultation, which met in April 1989. Observing those internationally respected scholars working together has been one of the high points of my life.

The focus of the Willowbank Consultation was narrow by design. Other important matters raised there have been left for another scholarly consultation that will be convened in 1991.

Tuvya Zaretsky

San Francisco, Calif.

Hoping for an intelligent discussion on the impact of one of the most horrendous historical events ever to occur, I found the usual knee-jerk conservative polemic to convert Jews.

Does not this event at least deserve the frank discussion of the hypothesis that possibly, just possibly, “Christian” Europe and the birthplace of Luther might have contributed something to the rationale for the destruction of European Jewry, and that Christian churches might have resisted and addressed the slaughter a bit more passionately?

Myers’s article displays the unfortunate amnesia current in evangelical theology.

Rev. John R. Mazarella

First Baptist Church

Arkansas City, Kans.

Mcquilkina “Marvelous Model”

Thank you so much for the sensitive and inspiring article “Living by Vows” [Oct. 8]. Having gone through a similar experience with my own parents, it was doubly meaningful to me. This is a marvelous model for our young people—what a testimony it must be on the Columbia Bible College and Seminary campus of commitment in marriage. Thank you for addressing this timely subject!

Janice Gerber

Harrisonburg, Va.

SPEAKING OUT

Stop Looking for “Miracles”

At a recent workshop at an international church conference, a Mennonite pastor from Indonesia told of God’s miraculous protection (by a wall of fire) from an anti-Christian Muslim mob. A Tanzanian Mennonite bishop then reported on miraculous healings.

The North American delegates attending the workshop responded with a question: “Why don’t we see such miracles in North America?” Indeed, the miraculous does seem more prevalent in the Third World. Is it because we are less faithful, less spiritually alive, less open-minded?

Charismatically inclined believers, such as John Wimber, argue that Western rationalism keeps North American Christians from expecting or seeking the miraculous, that our lack of expectancy is a key part of the problem.

An alternative explanation for the seeming lack of miracles lies in returning the initiative more fully to God. The question then becomes not “What are we North American Christians doing wrong that we don’t experience signs and wonders?” but “Why is God working differently in North America than in the Third World?” or “What can we learn from his chosen way of relating to us?”

That God deals differently with different people is evident from the Old Testament account of the Exodus, where God gave Egypt a series of stern warnings and plagues, whereas he gave Israel divine protection. And while the Egyptians experienced plagues, the idolatrous Canaanites were simply given over to slaughter (Josh. 10:40). Likewise, Paul preached differently to the philosophers of Athens than the Jews in Jerusalem (Acts 17:16–33; 22:1–21). This all suggests that attempting to reproduce Third World signs and wonders in a North American context may lead us to miss what God is trying to tell us.

Think for a moment about the Third World context in which signs and wonders occur. Wimber himself notes that they are most frequent in contexts where Christianity is pitted against the competing religions of animism and Islam. In a context of suffering, starvation, poverty, and persecution, miracles become a “sign” of the gospel, God’s marvelous intervention to rescue a fallen humanity.

In North America, however, such an approach falls too easily into the trap of the “health and wealth” gospel, as Christians seek healing from sunburns caused by careless use of leisure time, or from coronary heart disease caused by our rich diet. These Christians make God a passive, automatic dispenser of miracles, controlled by depositing the right coinage of faith and prayer and spirituality.

In such a climate, “blessing” miracles are not the needed sign of God’s presence. They may lead us to worship ourselves and our own desires even more. In our setting, repentance and judgment, radical conversion, and a loving concern for others are the needed evidence of God’s Spirit and presence. It is not the sign of the healing at the temple gate that we are likely to be given in North America but the miracle of Ananias and Sapphira or the fall of Jim Bakker. What we are missing is not the proof of God’s marvelous intervention to bless us. We are overly blessed already. What we rich North Americans may most need is the prophetic denunciation of our luxurious indifference, our careless indulgence, and our arrogant self-satisfaction.

“An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah,” Jesus said, referring to his death and resurrection (Matt. 12:39). What we need in many cases is not just the good news of the gospel but an unsettling, uncompromising call to follow Christ in discipleship. If and when we follow, that will be evidence that God is indeed alive and active among his people.

By James R. Coggins, associate editor of the Mennonite Brethren Herald. He is coeditor of the book Wonders and the Word (Kindred Press).

Speaking Out offers responsible Christians a forum for their views on contemporary issues. It does not necessarily reflect the opinions of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Schuller No “Outlaw”

I have long been an enthusiastic reader and supporter of CT. However, I am appalled at the book review in your October 8 issue. Under the heading of “TV’s Spiritual Outlaws” you portray some pictures of people who supposedly fit that title. I want you to know that my long-time friend and current senior pastor, Robert Schuller, in no way deserves to be so labeled. Unlike so many TV evangelists, he is a respected member of a respected denomination and is the pastor of a very wonderfully Christ-centered and biblically based church.

The unfortunate layout of the page makes him guilty by association. I only hope that in the future you will be more careful in how you deal with brothers and sisters in the Lord.

Bruce Larson, Co-Pastor

The Crystal Cathedral

Garden Grove, Calif.

None of the other ministers collected in the photographs on page 73 have lived under the eye and under the potential call to judgment of a denomination as old and as historic in its commitment to historic Christianity as I do. Surely that outlaws the label outlaw!

Robert H. Schuller

The Crystal Cathedral

Garden Grove, Calif.

I would remind your reviewer and the authors of The Agony of Deceit that Robert Schuller is accountable to the Classis of California, of which he is a member. He is not a free-wheeling spiritual outlaw.

Edwin G. Mulder, General Secretary

Reformed Church in America

New York, N.Y.

The authors of The Agony of Deceit called their subjects “spiritual outlaws,” and those authors were critical of Schuller’s theology along with that of other television evangelists. We regret that publishing their phrase and the pictures of other evangelists along with Schuller’s mayhave left the impression that CT believes him to be heterodox.—Eds.

Neuhaus’S Lutheran Connections

Concerning your news story “Neuhaus Leaves Lutheran Church for Catholicism” [Oct. 8] permit me to help you make the report more accurate.

Richard John Neuhaus was not, as the story asserts, ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Neither did he spend “nearly 30 years” as a pastor in the ELCA. He was ordained in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, where he served the first years of his pastoral ministry. Following the exodus from LCMS after the purge of that denomination’s flagship Saint Louis Seminary in the early 1970s, Neuhaus became a member of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC), a denomination that helped to form the ELCA in 1988.

Rev. Michael Sherer

Director of

Communications, ELCA

Findlay, Ohio

Bibles To The Ussr

I read with interest your news article on Bibles for the Soviet Union [“The Bible Comes in from the Cold,” Oct. 8]. While the information was most helpful, there was an inadvertent omission. Bibles for the World has been mailing New Testaments to individuals in the Soviet Union for the past 15 years. Prior to glasnost, 650,000 New Testaments were mailed from India under the provision of a cultural-exchange agreement. During the past six months, New Testaments have been mailed as gifts to individuals in the Soviet Union from the United States.

Marshall R. Gillam

Director of Administration

Bibles for the World

Wheaton, Ill.

Credit Where Due

Your September 24 article “Spirit in the Skyways” concerns a ministry to business executives in Minneapolis. This is an Assemblies of God ministry; the director and originator of this outreach is one of our fine ministers.

In the same issue was “Why the Bishops Went to Valdosta.” In that this lengthy article identified the Valdosta congregation as an Assemblies of God church, we are disappointed that “Spirit in the Skyways” was not identified as an Assemblies of God ministry. The congregation that joined the Episcopal Church was independent and had broken away from Evangel Assembly of God. Evangel Assembly continues to be a viable, strong congregation.

G. Raymond Carlson

General Superintendent

The Assemblies of God

Springfield, Mo.

Some things we take for granted: agencies like the Internal Revenue Service, entertainers like Bill Cosby, and truisms such as “Christians rarely do much for the down-and-out.”

A critical look at that last item reminds us that we also take for granted the work of the Salvation Army. As soon as the pre-Christmas shopping season arrives, bell-ringers with bright red kettles seem to sprout at every major intersection.

Your quarters in those red kettles pay for thousands of Christmas baskets that bring holiday cheer to the gray existence of the nation’s poor—who do not take the Army for granted. (Factoid: The first such baskets consisted of 150 plum puddings baked in 1867 by Catherine Booth, the wife of the Army’s founder, General William Booth.)

Writer Verne Becker also took the Army and its ministry for granted. But shortly before we asked him to tell CT’s readers what happens to the quarters they drop in the kettle, he and his wife moved from the ’burbs to the center of Chicago. There they hoped to enjoy the city’s abundance of good restaurants and art galleries. But as they discovered that their new neighborhood included one of the nation’s oldest inner-city ministries, they came to know the faces of the poor.

You can read Verne’s account of a day of bell-ringing—and of the work of the Salvation Army—beginning on p. 18. We hope that you, like us, will no longer take that organization for granted.

Impressions of a foreign country linger as single, disconnected scenes, like tourist snapshots, and that is how I remember my brief excursion into East Germany late last summer. The nation itself hung in limbo: The week I roamed the countryside, its government voted away its own sovereignty by agreeing on merger with West Germany. I wanted to see the land before it disappeared, or was “franchised” by the affluent West.

You needn’t drive far—100 yards across the former border will do—to note glaring differences. West Germany looks as uniformly neat and prosperous as any society on earth. East Germany is drab, run-down, colorless. The farms are bigger (communal), but far less productive. Soot-colored buildings sag, in dire need of repair. Railroads are slow: After World War II, Soviet conquerors stole half the railroad tracks so that now a train must pull onto a siding to get around each oncoming train.

Strange, I think, how we romanticize societies less developed than our own. Right-wing regimes in Spain and Portugal forestalled development for decades, and when they opened up, Western tourists flocked in to see pristine coastal villages and charming cities unspoiled by modern skylines. After a few years of freedom they began looking like those in France and Italy. Now the tourists are invading East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary for a last look before those nations, too, sprout McDonald’s and video rental shops. We yearn for what we’ve lost; they yearn for what they’ve never had.

West Germans love to gossip about their Eastern cousins, who wear bumpkinish clothes, putter about in ridiculous Trabants (“plastic cars that rats eat,” said one friend), and gawk at gaudy window displays. Stories abound of those who eagerly hired Easterners, only to find they didn’t understand the work ethic: They showed up late, took no pride in their work, and could not master basic principles of pleasing the customer. The stories are eerily reminiscent of what I used to hear in the American South, when white employers first began hiring blacks.

Walking through an East German village freshly stocked with coffee grinders, lingerie, and CD players, I catch a glimpse of materialism in its precynical stages. Window shopping has become a serious art form. These people actually stop and listen to a vacuum-cleaner salesman hawking his wares on a sidewalk. They study his brochures like gospel tracts.

Astonishingly, they express the same studious interest in actual gospel tracts. In Bonn, say, a tract distributor braces himself for scorn and verbal assaults. But near East Berlin, I saw Germans eagerly going up to ask street evangelists for their literature. It was a curious scene: four overweight guitar pickers stood in a town square and sang—in English!—“There is power in the blood.” And still people took their tracts.

My guide, a long-time friend and a leader in West German church renewal, tells me, though, that the church in the East has never been more confused and disoriented. The bright light that shone during the peaceful revolution a year ago has dimmed. Many people left the church after it had served its political usefulness; others defected in protest over a pastor’s decision to shelter the Communist leader Erich Honecker.

For that matter, says my guide, all of East Germany seems confused and disoriented. The underlying myth or “story” of an entire society has been rejected. Remnants of the old story remain. Tourist brochures at the palace in Potsdam, unedited since propaganda days, lecture sternly against the filthy capitalists who enjoyed such luxury at the expense of the poor. Now everyone is courting the filthy capitalists, voting for them, inviting them in to straighten out their economy.

My guide offers a sad comment: “It pains me that all we have to send them is a truckload of deutsche marks. No one here is talking about qualities of a better humanity, as Václav Havel does in Czechoslovakia. The church, too, treats the merger like a business takeover. How do we sort out our differences in pension plans, publishing policies, and seminary requirements?”

A moment of grace, swallowed up by law.

Portions of the Wall that once divided Germany remain. In rural areas, it snakes across the landscape, its watchtowers sticking the sky like splinters. It has to be the ugliest construction in history, with none of the elegance of Hadrian’s Wall in England, or the Great Wall in China. Concrete bunkers slotted for machine guns, searchlights mounted on steel scaffolds, a barren “no man’s land” once patrolled by attack dogs, concrete posts laced with miles of barbed wire—this wall, bizarrely, was built to keep people inside, not out, a prison wall 20 yards wide and several hundred miles long.

And yet in Berlin the Wall is mostly gone. We had to ask four people before finding a section of it tucked away between rows of buildings. The Germans, anxious to heal disfigurement, have hacked the Wall apart, sold it as souvenirs, and recovered the ground with bicycle paths, walkways, and outdoor sculpture gardens. Checkpoint Charlie stands like a frontier ghost town, manned by two lonely guards with nothing to check.

The Museum of the Wall still does a thriving business, displaying the homemade planes, balloons, catapults, and submarines used by brave escapees. But it seems oddly anachronistic without the looming presence of the Wall. Perhaps future generations of Germans will rebuild sections of the Wall as a darkling shrine—just as the Allies rebuilt portions of bulldozed Dachau.

At the end of 1989, Germanies East and West were filled with joy and hope. At the end of 1990, realism has settled in to temper those emotions. A generation may pass before the two societies feel comfortably assimilated.

The broader world is also adjusting to the changes being worked out in miniature in Germany. A year ago, as communist regimes fell almost weekly, some historians were crowing about “the end of history,” a time when liberal democracies would triumph and a new, peaceful world order would emerge.

Nations may change, history changes, politics change, but human nature does not change. I was reminded of that fact, too, while visiting East Germany: It was the week Iraq invaded Kuwait. When some walls fall, others spring up to take their place.

Christians in the Middle East are seeing a steady stream of Persian Gulf refugees become followers of Christ, often as a result of humanitarian aid offered by the Christians.

Human needs have lessened in the past two months as governments and Christian agencies have coordinated relief efforts to augment the work of Jordanian believers (CT, Oct. 8, 1990, p. 69). At the same time, the flow of refugees has dropped to a comparative trickle. Shortly after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, 15,000 to 20,000 refugees a day, most of them workers from Asian nations, were pouring into Jordan. By October, about 1,000 a day were entering Jordan, and more were leaving than entering the country, according to Issam Ghattas of Manarah Book Ministries in Jordan.

“The refugee situation today is vastly different from what it was a month ago,” said Robert Reed, who directs work for the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the Middle East. Incoming refugees are getting transportation to their homelands relatively quickly.

Still, a “backlog” of about 500,000 people was trying to leave Iraq and Kuwait in mid-October, said Dick Anderson, Africa and Middle East director for World Relief. And physical and spiritual ministry is continuing among them, with notable results.

Arab Openness

At the airport near Jordan’s capital city, Amman, where refugees must wait for up to two days before flying out of the country, Christians have been holding nightly evangelistic meetings. Some nights as many as 100 people have received Christ, said one Jordanian believer. He has distributed thousands of New Testaments in Tagalog (the chief language of the Philippines) and Singhalese (the chief language of Sri Lanka) and has also given out Arabic Bibles and New Testaments.

The refugee camps on Jordan’s border with Iraq have also been the site of many conversions, according to Christian sources in Jordan. At the camp at Azraq, where Jordanian Christians distributed food, water, Scriptures, and Christian literature, 60 to 100 Filipinos were turning to Christ daily. About 150 Filipino Christians from Kuwait stayed in the camp to hold two daily worship services and witness to fellow refugees, the sources reported.

Doug Clark, Middle East-North Africa director for the Assemblies of God, said from Cyprus, “We’ve heard reports that some South Asian people have remained deliberately in Kuwait in order to share their faith, but others have gone to the refugee camps and are working among their own people in those camps.”

World Relief’s Anderson also reports spiritual revival among Jordanian Christians. One long-time missionary in Jordan told Anderson that the opportunity to put faith into action by ministering to the refugees had sparked the whole church. “In 65 years of working in Jordan, this was the greatest revival he had seen,” Anderson said.

Similar reports have also come from nearby Cyprus, where people who have gotten out of Jordan often must wait for visas to go elsewhere. Alistair Wynne, pastor of the Nicosia Community Church, a Protestant congregation for internationals, said Arabs there are not only getting help with visas from Christians but also are worshiping at the church and attending Arabic Bible studies during the week.

“The Arabs who have made it to Cyprus are wide open to the gospel in a way they haven’t been before,” Wynne said. He said the invasion of one Arab nation into another “has shaken the faith of many of these people.… Many of the Muslims are quite surprised by the help they are getting from the local Christians.”

Christian ministry in Arab countries, however, still faces opposition. Some Middle Eastern Christians have complained about Western agencies’ control of relief efforts. Relief agencies agree that they should be responsive to local churches. But they also cite the need to be accountable to Western donors for how their money is used.

In addition, some Muslims in Jordan resent the Christians, according to Anderson. “Church people are being referred to as crusaders by some of the ultraconservative Muslim groups, and that is a real concern. If there’s war, Christian Arabs might be caught in a backlash because they are identified with the West.”

By Stan Guthrie.

CAPITAL CURRENTS

U.S. doors open wider

President Bush has authorized the admission of up to 131,000 refugees to the United States next year, an increase of 6,000 over the past year’s numbers. Under federal provisions, the U.S. will pay for the travel costs for all but 10,000 of those refugees who are seeking asylum from religious, ethnic, or political persecution. The rest will be paid for by private groups.

The allocations breakdown is as follows: the Soviet Union, 50,000 people; Southeast Asia, 52,000; the Middle East and South Asia, 6,000; Africa, 4,900; Latin America, 3,100; and Eastern Europe, 1,500.

Don Hammond, director of World Relief’s USA Ministries, called the numbers “adequate for the year, as long as we don’t see any emergencies anywhere.” If new problems do arise, he said, “we are going to be hard pressed to meet them.” However, he added, “I think it’s probably the best the administration could do considering the budget constraints.” World Relief works with American churches in resettling refugees in the U.S.

At the high court

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases that could have impact on the abortion debate. In New York (Rust) v. Sullivan, the justices are deciding the constitutionality of federal regulations that separate abortion from the nation’s family-planning program. The case specifically involves the Title X program, which requires family-planning providers to be physically and financially separate from abortion services, to refer clients to prenatal care, and to refrain from advocating abortion. Several advocates of legalized abortion are challenging the regulations (CT, Oct. 22, 1990, p. 62).

In United Auto Workers v. Johnson Controls, the Court is considering whether a company’s fetal-protection policy violates federal sex-discrimination laws by keeping all women of childbearing years from certain hazardous jobs. Johnson Controls, a battery manufacturer, excluded women from jobs involving exposure to lead, saying that “the health and safety of unborn children from toxic manufacturing operations” takes precedent over “gender equality in the workplace.”

The unions, however, argued that the policy amounts to sex discrimination in violation of federal laws. The case has no direct connections to abortion, but prolifers are watching it closely to see what kinds of protections the justices are willing to give to the unborn.

In other action, the justices:

• let stand a lower-court ruling requiring a Pennsylvania public high school to rent its auditorium to Campus Crusade for Christ;

• let stand the racketeering convictions of a Virginia couple for selling and renting obscene materials in their three bookstores and nine video-rental businesses. Their conviction was the federal government’s first successful use of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law to prosecute obscenity;

• denied the appeal of a former air force sergeant convicted of assault under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for engaging in hom*osexual activity after testing positive for AIDS.

Negotiating a treaty

The Salvation Army and the U.S. Labor Department have begun discussions in an attempt to settle their dispute over paying minimum wages to persons enrolled in the Salvation Army’s rehabilitation programs (CT, Oct. 22, 1990, p. 58). Last month, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, dismissed the Salvation Army’s request for a hearing about whether it should be forced to comply with a Labor Department order to pay the wages. The Salvation Army says it should not have to pay the wages because participants in the program are in “work therapy” and not employees.

The Labor Department has said it will not bring enforcement action for 120 days while the discussions are taking place. One possible compromise would be a legislative exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act for groups like the Salvation Army.

“We do hope the matter can be solved without further litigation,” said the Salvation Army’s national chief secretary, Col. Kenneth Hood. However, he added, if the discussions fail, his organization will bring further legal action rather than comply with the order.

Around town

Two of the highest-ranking evangelicals in the Bush administration are leaving. Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole has resigned to become president of the American Red Cross. Health and Human Services Undersecretary for Public Affairs Kay James will head up the One to One Foundation.

Bread for the World founder and president Art Simon was presented the 1990 Presidential End Hunger Award at a White House ceremony last month.

At a press conference, Feed the Children president Larry Jones transferred 80 tons of food to District of Columbia churches to distribute to the needy. The food was collected during concerts by the popular country group the Highwaymen led by Waylon Jennings.

Charitable giving and volunteerism are on the rise in this country, thanks largely to the generous character of religious people, according to a new Independent Sector/Gallup survey.

“The caring spirit is alive and very much growing, even [among] the so-called me generation of baby boomers,” said Brian O’Connell, president of Independent Sector, a coalition of 650 corporate, foundation, and voluntary organizations.

The report, released at a Washington, D.C., press conference last month, found that 75 percent of American households are contributing an average of $734 annually to charitable causes. That dollar figure represents a 20 percent increase (after inflation) from two years ago. Similarly, the number of Americans volunteering their time and talents to charitable endeavors is at 98 million, up 23 percent from 1987.

One of the most significant findings in the survey was that religious belief is a major factor in contributions of time and money. Over half of the respondents surveyed reported having made contributions to religious organizations. Moreover, 80 percent of those affiliated with a religious institution reported household contributions to charity, and nearly 60 percent volunteered.

Those who attended religious services weekly “were clearly the most generous givers of both time and money, compared with all other groups,” said the report. It continued, “People who attended church regularly were far more likely to give a higher percentage of their household income to charitable causes.”

In addition, survey respondents specifically identified religion as a major motivating factor. Fifty-three percent of all givers said their motive was feeling they should “help those who had less,” and 43 percent said “such behavior met their religious beliefs or commitment.” Those listing such motives were also significantly above the national giving averages.

“Religious organizations have been a major, if not the greatest, influence in developing the tradition of giving and volunteering to both spiritual and secular causes,” the report said.

According to O’Connell, a particularly encouraging sign is that much of this increase can be attributed to the “baby boom generation,” which in previous studies had not indicated strong giving values. Noting that people usually tend to give more as they age, O’Connell said the trends “make the picture for future giving and volunteering in this country very bright.”

O’Connell added he is confident that even a severe economic downturn in this country would not harm charitable giving, given the reasons respondents cited for giving.

Among other findings in the report:

• The wealthiest are among the “stingiest” demographic group. Those with household incomes of $100,000 or more contributed 2.9 percent of their income, while households having incomes of under $10,000 gave 5.5 percent.

• Strong increases in both giving and volunteering were recorded in the African-American community, with 61 percent of all blacks contributing to charities, up from 51 percent in 1987.

• Nearly 90 percent of all respondents agreed that charities are needed more today than in the past.

There are those within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) who despise the Presbyterian Layman and others who value it highly. The controversial publication is the major vehicle through which the Presbyterian Lay Committee (PLC) has made its voice heard in the 2.9 million-member denomination. (See “Gadfly Group Has Grassroots Appeal,” p. 61.)

Even those who don’t agree with the attitudes and viewpoints emerging from the PLC find the Layman a valuable source for denominational news. At the very least, the publication could never be accused of pulling any punches.

The September/October issue of the Layman exemplified the PLC’s no-holds-barred style of journalism. Ostensibly, the 12-page tabloid told the story of Kansas farmer and Presbyterian elder Wilbur Smith’s battle with the PCUSA bureaucracy.

According to the story, Smith received a tip in 1987 from a fellow farmer that his pastor had been frequenting a topless bar in Topeka in the guise of a heavy-equipment salesman. After Lewis and two other elders issued a complaint to the local presbytery, they were assured these visits to Topeka would stop.

But later, Lewis had reason to believe they had not stopped. He paid a private investigator to make sure. For $600, the investigator produced a report detailing the activities of Smith’s pastor, whom the Layman did not identify by name. Those activities, according to the Layman, included “inserting money inside the strippers’ G-strings” and “voicing cat calls when they removed all of their clothing.”

Lewis claimed in the Layman article that the minister in question confirmed the accuracy of the investigator’s report. But this minister defended his behavior as part of his “bar ministry.” The Layman article went on to detail Lewis’s frustrated attempts to work through church channels to take action against his pastor, who eventually moved on to another church.

Ministry Barroom Style

The Layman quoted Albert Cook of the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery of Northern Kansas as saying that “Professor Paul Jones of the St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, under whom [the minister in question] undertook the bar ministry in the first place, has supervised these ministries for more than twenty-five years, with amazing results.”

But the Layman quoted Professor Jones, after hearing portions of the investigator’s report, as saying, “He didn’t learn that from me.” Jones told the Layman that ministers who go to bars should wear clerical collars, should not drink alcohol, and must act in a manner above reproach.

Defending the church’s handling of the case, Cook said Presbyterian officials acted as responsibly as they could in addressing Lewis’s complaint. Cook said the Presbyterian system is representative, but acknowledged it is also “cumbersome,” particularly in the geographically huge Presbytery of Northern Kansas. “At every step, Mr. Lewis wanted action yesterday,” said Cook, who charged that Lewis had run-ins with the three previous ministers at his church as well.

Cook said he had no doubt the minister in question was sincere in wanting to have a significant and positive impact through his bar ministry on the lives of those connected with the barroom scene. “This was not a case of someone getting his jollies from watching the jiggle show,” Cook said, adding that the minister’s bar ministry was both known to and supported by his family and several members of the congregation.

Cook said there was no reason to doubt the details in the investigator’s report regarding the minister’s specific activities. He said this behavior was never endorsed by the church at any level and that the man in question had been rebuked for conduct unbecoming a minister. He added that Lewis was out of line for bringing the issue to light as he did.

Indeed, Lewis, claiming he was frustrated at the denomination’s response to his complaint, resorted to mass mailings of the investigator’s report to Presbyterian ministers. In May, he was found guilty by the judicial commission of disturbing the peace and unity of the denomination. He has filed an appeal to the Northern Kansas presbytery’s synod.