Page 5035 – Christianity Today (2024)

An apology from one of shepherding’s pioneers has resurrected discussion of the pros and cons of the movement.

In the summer of 1982, participants in the “shepherding” movement from across California gathered at San Jose State University to hear speakers call their movement “as revolutionary as the Reformation, as radical as the Anabaptist movement.” Bob Mumford, one of the movement’s five founders, told listeners of his 11-year-old vision of six well-trained horses pulling the king’s carriage.

Mixing giddy humor and fiery preaching, Mumford suggested that believers, undergirded by shepherding, would be that team of horses. But he warned that other groups once had enjoyed the same privileged mission, only to lose it through disobedience: “One day, God said to the Methodists, ‘That’s all! It’s finished as a movement!’”

Ready To Unravel

It was a heady time for those in the shepherding, or discipleship, movement, whose teachings on the believer’s need for “spiritual authority” had caused a deep split within charismatic circles. But the shepherding movement—so-called because its members had “shepherds,” who exercised strict control over them—was about to unravel. Its five founders—Mumford, Charles Simpson, Derek Prince, Ern Baxter, and Don Basham—would soon begin to go their separate ways. In 1986 the remaining leaders would meet in Chicago to disband quietly. While Simpson and some other leaders would continue to keep their people together under new associations, the controversy began to subside.

But old feelings were stirred anew recently when Mumford issued a formal, public apology for his part in the movement. More than five years after he abandoned shepherding in 1984, Mumford is seeking forgiveness from those who were hurt. And he has challenged anyone still affected by the movement’s practices to “take whatever steps necessary to return to a Christ-centered life.” (See interview on facing page.)

Mumford’s apology aroused strong reaction among former members and launched a new debate on shepherding and its shortfalls. Those with differing judgments of the movement agree that Mumford’s apology comes at a time when the charismatic movement remains long on experiential theology and short on sound doctrine. Ironically, the shepherding movement was in large part a response to what its founders saw as a lack of spiritual maturity, sound doctrine, and discipline within charismatic churches that were then growing by leaps and bounds.

“We Touched A Raw Nerve”

It was to address this void in the charismatic community that Mumford joined with Simpson, Prince, and Basham in 1970 as part of Christian Growth Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Baxter came aboard later. The men published the magazine New Wine and held conferences at which they addressed such topics as the need to hold believers accountable. Mumford, now based in San Rafael, California, said that by 1975 he knew the movement would grow rapidly because it “had touched a raw nerve in the body of Christ.” “People were so hungry,” he said, “so desirous for a place to belong and for someone to care.”

Simpson estimates 50,000 members took part in shepherding at its peak. Mumford said the group touched upwards of 100,000 people directly or indirectly. But as the movement began to plant churches or take existing ones under its wings, it met with stiff criticism, especially from Pentecostal and charismatic leaders, who charged that shepherds were overstepping their bounds by virtually ordering their disciples in such areas as whom to marry and where to reside.

Moreover, concern arose about the movement’s aims. A 1976 report by the Assemblies of God maintained that some leaders in shepherding “claim their mission and the church’s mission is no longer evangelism, but the setting up of a new order on earth in prospect of bringing in the Kingdom. But the New Testament does not indicate we can set up a purified external order in this age.”

Picking Up The Pieces

Such views on the movement—and the problems it caused—have changed little with time. Jack Hayford, in an article for Ministries Today magazine on the restoration of Mumford, wrote, “Multiplied hundreds of pastors, like myself, have spent large amounts of time over the past 15 years picking up the pieces of broken lives that resulted from distortion of truth by extreme teachings and destructive applications on discipleship, authority and shepherding.”

It has fallen largely to Simpson, considered the one leader still carrying the movement’s banner, to defend its practices. In a lengthy interview, he maintained that the group and its leaders have been barraged for years by false accusations from church leaders and from both secular and religious media.

Simpson acknowledged that during the explosive growth years of the late 1970s, many, including himself, had been too domineering and had hurt others as they tried to find ways to lead the movement. But he said these leaders already have apologized for those hurts and changed practices to prevent their recurrence.

“We’re 20 years older as a movement,” Simpson said. “In a word, I would say we’re a lot more flexible than we were 20 years ago.”

Beyond that acknowledgment, Simpson strongly defended the movement. He denied that the group as a whole lost focus on the lordship of Christ. He suggested the younger shepherds were given too much blame for what went wrong. And he denied any aims to set up a “perfected church” before Christ returns. “I never did teach we were going to bring in the kingdom apart from the Lord,” he said.

Simpson did acknowledge rubbing shoulders with people who held such a view. “When you’re preaching something on the cutting edge,” he said, “you’re going to be very close to people off the edge.”

Today Simpson is the founder and chairman of the Fellowship of Covenant Ministries and Churches. Based in Mobile, Alabama, he helps oversee an organization of 150 churches and 10,000 people. To him, the many people helped through shepherding vindicates his efforts. And he sees new vistas.

“The seventies were a time of focusing and discipleship,” he said, “the eighties were a time of focusing on churches, and in the nineties the focus is on nations.” Along with current work in Africa and Central America, Simpson said his group is optimistic about ministry opportunites in Eastern Europe and the Orient.

Different Directions

Those who left the movement went in various directions. Some got involved for a time with the activities of the national organization Coalition on Revival, which consists of evangelicals, fundamentalists, and Reconstructionists. A few, like Mumford’s former disciple Dennis Peaco*cke, have dabbled in Reconstructionism. Peaco*cke, who keeps close ties with former shepherding churches in northern California, dedicated a 1987 book to Mumford and to theonomists Gary North and R. J. Rushdoony.

Some former leaders, according to Craig Hawkins of the Christian Research Institute, have been drawn more into what is sometimes labeled the “latter day restoration” movement, which emphasizes perfecting the church in anticipation of Christ’s return. Still others have sought out denominations to provide them with more of a sense of roots, while others have simply become part of the larger, more traditional charismatic movement.

Basham died in 1989. The group’s other founders continue to be in demand as teachers. Baxter, about whom observers differed on whether he had “released” his disciples, was teaching in Australia and unavailable for comment. Both he and Prince are in charge of independent Christian ministries.

By Robert Digitale.

INTERVIEW

Mumford: Application, Not Doctrine, Was Flawed

Bob Mumford, 59, was one of five prominent leaders of the discipleship, or shepherding, movement. He left it in 1984 and recently made a public apology for the damaged lives that have resulted from abuse of the shepherding concept. Mumford discussed that apology and other aspects of the movement with CT correspondent Robert Digitale.

Briefly explain what it is you’ve apologized for.

I got involved in spiritual-growth ministries because I have a love for ministry and a concern for the unity and spiritual maturity of the church. But there were deviations in the proper application of biblical truths I espoused.

What are those truths and how did they contribute to the movement’s growth?

The discipleship movement was born during a time in which every kind of authority was being challenged. People needed to belong, to be a part of something. There was also a widespread cry for personal discipline; people hungered to get their lives together.

Out of the need to belong came the emphasis on covenantal relationships. From the need for discipline came the idea of mentoring, or discipleship. Leaders took responsibility for the spiritual growth of followers. Today I wonder why the church didn’t approach it more carefully. It seems self-evident that these doctrines lend themselves to abuse. Yet I believe the truths themselves are biblical and that the error was in the application.

Do you include yourself among those who didn’t approach these truths with enough caution?

Yes. If I’d had a clear church history perspective, I would have seen where this thing was going sooner than I did. The problems were not new. In 1 Peter 5, Peter tells the elders not to lord it over the flock.

In 1974, the godly theologian Kilian McDonald warned me that the movement had no mechanism to bring leaders, especially young leaders, to maturity. More than anything, I’m apologizing for deaf ears. But in my own defense, by this time the movement had gained a certain momentum. And there was no steering wheel.

How bad were the abuses? I’ve heard, for example, of a leader who told a man his wife was rebellious and following God’s will might mean divorcing her.

I would consider that an extreme. Those in authority directed job changes, they encouraged or discouraged marriages. Pastors have always offered counsel, but in our movement it took on a dimension of spiritual authority, leading to injury, hurt, and in some cases, disaster.

If the doctrine was sound, what went wrong?

Some of what went on was badly motivated, but most of the abuses resulted from what Paul called zeal without knowledge. To illustrate, people assumed that if one vitamin is good, six are better. So when personal discipline wasn’t “working,” the response was to increase the authority. It put leaders into a sphere where biblical limitations on their authority were not clear.

People took something that began in the spirit and attempted to perfect it in the flesh. Ends began to justify means. The attitude became, “I’m going to help you walk straight, even if I have to coerce you.” This is not the spirit of the gospel.

Part of the motivation behind my public apology is the realization that this wrong attitude is still present in hundreds of independent church groups who are answerable to no one. I’m trying to get people still attached to a church of that nature to recenter their lives on Jesus Christ and to re-examine how these truths are being applied.

What lessons have been in this for you?

I have a basic biblical conviction that is hard to resolve. I call it the law of direct proportion. I believe that if the truth doesn’t have the power to hurt, it doesn’t have the power to help. Sometimes the church doesn’t help anyone because it’s afraid to hurt anyone.

I still believe that discipleship within covenant relationships has the power to change lives, heal churches, and enable the kingdom of God to progress. It also has the potential to injure people. But I don’t want to be afraid of the truth. I believe these truths are going through a death and resurrection, that they will return to help the larger body of Christ. The important thing is always to be accountable to others.

Do the problems with the shepherding movement illustrate the need for a sound theology within the charismatic movement?

Charismatic renewal was never designed by the Lord to be an entity in its own [right], to be isolated from mainline Christianity. In the Second Great Awakening, the accusation was also emotionalism with an absence of teaching. But we’re seeing less and less of a charismatic/noncharismatic distinction. We saw convergence at Lausanne in Manila, and it’s happening with the National Religious Broadcasters. My hope is for the mature charismatic and the open evangelical to coalesce so that the body of Christ can have both biblical orthodoxy and a vital Christian experience.

What do you see happening, then, with the charismatic movment in the nineties?

It is in a serious transitional time. Because of its inadequate theological foundation, I see things coming unglued ethically and morally. I think Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart are only the first birth pangs of that kind of thing. I predict we’re going to see a loss of leadership because men are motivated by selfishness and are preaching an essentially crossless Christianity.

But I believe Jesus loves the church, the local church, in all its subnormality, and that he intends to make it what it ought to be. I believe that in the next 10 years we’re going to see various disturbances, theological changes, and an insistence from the Lord for the church to become what the New Testament describes it to be.

Classic and contemporary excerpts.

Limiting God

Is it not a frightening truth that the free will of a bad man can resist the will of God? For He has, after a fashion, restricted His own Omnipotence by the very fact of creating free creatures; and we read that the Lord was not able to do miracles in some place because people’s faith was wanting.

—C. S. Lewis in a letter to Don

Calabria (Letters, ed. Martin Moynihan)

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

All our children were in bed; the late television news was over, and I was putting the finishing touches to a presentation for medical students scheduled to be given the next day. As I reviewed some slides which might be used, there appeared on the screen a picture of an abortion victim, aged two and one-half months’ gestation; her body had been dismembered by a curette, the long handled knife used in a D&C abortion procedure.

Suddenly I heard, rather than saw, another person near me. At the sound of a sharp intake of breath, I turned to find that my youngest son, then a sleepy, rumpled three-year-old, had unexpectedly and silently entered the room. His small voice was filled with great sadness as he asked, “Who broke the baby?”

How could this small, innocent child see what so many adults cannot see?

—Jean Stoker Garton on herdecision to become a prolife activist, in her book

Who Broke the Baby?

Downward Mobility

Everything in me wants to move upward. Downward mobility with Jesus goes radically against my inclinations, against the advice of the world surrounding me, and against the culture of which I am a part.

—Henri Nouwen in the

New Oxford Review (April 1987)

Self-Pity As Art

The attractiveness of pity and the ugliness of self-pity are unarguable. Yet we live in a society in which self-pity far exceeds pity. The excessively popular genre of literature, the celebrity autobiography, that smothers us in self-pitying subjectivism is the unpleasant evidence that we may be the most self-pitying populace in all of human history. Feeling sorry for yourself has been developed into an art form. The whining and sniveling that wiser generations ridiculed with satire is given best-seller status among us.

—Eugene H. Peterson in

Earth and Altar

The Real Self

If we go down into ourselves we find that we possess exactly what we desire.

—Simone Weil in

Gravity and Grace

Daily Discernment

Our knowledge of God’s will is not something over which we ourselves dispose, but it depends solely upon the grace of God, and this grace is, and requires to be, new every morning. That is why this proving or examining of the will of God is so serious a matter. The voice of the heart is not to be confused with the will of God, nor is any kind of inspiration or any general principle, for the will of God discloses itself ever anew only to him who proves it ever anew.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer in

The Martyred Christian

Single-Minded Purpose

The moment I realized that God existed, I knew I could not do otherwise than to live for Him alone.

—Charles de Foucald in

The Wisdom of the Saints

The “Good” Life?

It is not hard for anyone in this church, for anyone in this neighborhood, to put food on the table.… [W]hat we’re talking about is ministry to those for whom it has become harder every day to have two cars, a VCR, a place at the lake or a motor home. I just hate to see the church telling these young couples that somehow their marriage will be better or their family life more fulfilling if they can only get some other piece of junk. The church ought to be courageous enough to say, “That’s a lie. Things don’t make a marriage or a family.”

Quoted by Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon in the

Christian Century (Mar. 15, 1989)

Not for the weak

When Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, he instinctively threw up his hand in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness. Gandhi understood what Jesus was about, or else he never could have said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong.”

—Stan Mooneyham in

Dancing on the Strait and Narrow

I. What Kind Of Power?

Kenneth Kantzer: Virtually all Christians accept the biblical notion of the power of the Holy Spirit. Just what sort of power are we talking about?

Russ Spittler: I have been helped to think about the power of the Holy Spirit in the sense of capacity—a kind of reservoir of potential energy. The power of the Spirit is a resource from God that might be tapped or might be utilized and applied in various ways.

James Packer: Whenever I hear it said that God gives us power “to use” or “to draw upon,” my hackles rise, because it seems so clear to me that the New Testament teaches us to think of the Spirit and his ministry in terms of a personal sovereignty whereby he uses us, not we him.

My frame of reference here is the Spirit’s personhood and mission. He is a person sent to us to glorify Jesus: to exhibit Christ, to make him known to people, and to bring them into fellowship with him. We can’t talk about the power of the Spirit to any purpose outside this frame of reference.

With this I would highlight the Holy Spirit as change agent. He changes us internally first by opening our eyes to reality—the reality of God, of Christ, of our sin and need, of the spiritual realm, of the demonic, and so on; and then, through uniting us to Christ, he changes us motivationally and dispositionally at the center of our being, so that the desires and attitudes of Christ in his incarnate life on earth are reproduced in us. This is the literal new creation that begins the process of character change called sanctification, whereby we are made more and more like the Lord.

Doxology, which means giving praise and glory to God, is central to this new life. The new person in Christ has a Spirit-given, Spirit-sustained instinct to love and trust and honor and praise God. The Spirit’s power is shown in Christians first and foremost by the inducing and energizing of this dominant drive to please and glorify God. The life of worship and service is always supernatural in reality. When there’s physical or personal weakness and yet doxology by word and deed continues, this supernaturalness becomes obvious in a way in which, under other circ*mstances, it might not be. When the outward man is perishing, the renewal of the inner man day by day can be a very remarkable thing.

Kantzer: Do you agree that the Holy Spirit’s power can be likened to the potential to do something beyond our abilities?

Packer: I don’t find the language of potentiality very helpful. The Spirit does what he does. His supernaturalizing of our lives enables Christians, as a matter of fact, to do much for the Lord that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. That’s the whole doctrine of gifts and ministry. It’s my part to see what God calls me to do, to ask the Lord to enable me to do it, then to get up off my knees and go confidently into action, watching to see what help I shall be given, and finally to give thanks for what the Spirit did in and through me. It’s also my part to follow after holiness, for effective Spirit-empowered service ordinarily comes out of sanctity, and we shall go wrong if ever we forget that. “Potential” suggests to me something that in principle we can actualize, a reservoir of power on which we may draw, something, in other words, that we manage. I think that is the wrong idea. But I am anxious to stress that by the Spirit of God we are in fact enabled to serve the Lord in ways that would otherwise be impossible to us.

John Wimber: I generally endorse your teachings in this area, but I would emphasize the importance of the anointing of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit calls, claims, empowers, energizes, directs, guides, unctions—the whole work of developing converts. It’s also important to remember that the Trinity was involved in the Creation, and the Trinity will be involved in the culmination. It’s quite possible that in the summing up of things we will see a side of the Spirit’s work that we have yet to see. And it’s my view we are indeed in the last days.

Stuart Briscoe: When I think of the power of the Spirit, I think first of all of power in proclamation: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.… You shall be my witnesses.” If I didn’t believe there was some strange, supernatural way in which the words from man were going to be winged to the hearts of the people, then I wouldn’t be able to preach. And when I consider the variety of people who are sitting in the congregation—where they come from, their situations, the needs, the prejudices, the problems that they are facing—I realize it is absolutely ridiculous to stand before them and in my own power try to say anything of significance.

The second aspect of my understanding of the Spirit’s power is regeneration. I am totally overwhelmed with the thought of people being brought out of darkness into light—out of death into life—and I am frightened when I realize I am actually involved in something of that magnitude. Their eternal destiny is being changed. It’s a tremendous comfort to me to be reminded that no one can call Christ his Lord except by the Spirit.

The third aspect of power is sanctification. The remarkable thing of taking people like Zacchaeus and Levi—total social rejects—and making them into whole new people, something I see happening all the time, totally mystifies me. I see the evidence of the sheer power of the Spirit of God changing the disposition and motivation of people.

I also think of power in congregation. Paul talks in Ephesians about the way in which Jew and Gentile have been brought together and made into one new man, and how as a result of that he’s praying that now the Spirit of God might strengthen them together. The emphasis is that together they may prove the extent of the love of Christ. And to be involved in a congregation and to actually see that happen, to me, is further evidence of the Spirit’s power.

And then fifth, there is power in authentication—the way that the Spirit worked through the Lord Jesus and did the things that clearly set him apart as being the Son of God. That same thing happened with the apostles, and, of course, the question becomes how far that extends into the present.

Finally, I see power in inspiration. How did the Spirit of God take ordinary men of old and move them so that through them eternal truth can be communicated?

Charles Ryrie: I find myself in agreement with what Drs. Packer and Briscoe said about the stupendous, miraculous things the Holy Spirit did in regeneration, sanctification, and inspiration. Another work that hasn’t been mentioned is the work of conviction in John 16. That passage also promises the Spirit will teach us.

What has been said about changing character, I subscribe to wholeheartedly. And out of character come conduct and activity, and once the Spirit is at work conforming us to the image of Christ, then we will do those things that please the Father as our Lord can do. I don’t want to lose sight of that basic framework, because these are absolutely astounding, miraculous things that the Spirit does in the world and the church.

I think our disagreements will be on the expressions of the Spirit’s power. But I don’t think we will disagree with the fact that he has power and that these basic things are some of the most important evidences of that power.

Ii. Can We Expect Miracles?

Kantzer: An area that often comes up in discussions of the Spirit’s power is miracles. To what extent can the Christian expect the Holy Spirit to perform miracles?

Wimber: Since I adhere to theologian George Eldon Ladd’s teaching concerning the kingdom of the “already” and the “not yet,” I believe we are already empowered to give sight to the blind, but we are not going to give sight to all the blind. We are not going to give sight to the bulk of the blind because we are still in the “not yet.”

Kantzer: When you talk about “giving sight to the blind,” are you speaking figuratively or literally—or both?

Wimber: Literally. I have laid hands on people who were blind, and they now see. I also have laid hands on a larger number of blind who do not see and who got no particular benefit, evidently, from my prayers. We’re not in heaven now. All sorrow, all sickness isn’t over. But if we don’t proclaim this activity now, we won’t see any blind healed. And we can see them healed by divine Providence, in my opinion.

Kantzer: Maybe we should back up and define our terms. What is a miracle?

Briscoe: A theological definition would be “an extraordinary intervention by the sovereign Lord into the affairs of his universe.”

Ryrie: That’s a definition I would use for miracle, except that Satan can perform miracles, too. So I would prefer to define a miracle as any extraordinary event by a supernatural power, whether it be God or whether it be Satan. But for our discussion, we’re probably talking about genuine, God-given miracles.

Packer: For two centuries now we have let philosophers define miracles for us. They have told us that a miracle is God suspending or overriding natural law. But that is a secular definition, reflecting a deistic world view—a view, that is, that sees God’s world as a closed box of forces from which the Creator is ordinarily standing at a distance, uninvolved. The Bible view is that God through the Son “upholds all things by his word of power,” so that the regularities of nature are the regularities of God, and the irregularities of nature are the irregularities of God—a very different idea. God is as directly involved in the events that we would not call miracles as he is in those that we would describe as miraculous.

When you describe miracles as signs and wonders, you go to the heart of the matter. They are wonders because they are events that strike people as extraordinary, making them stop and blink. They are signs, quite specifically, that God is alive and active, and carrying forward purposes of mercy and judgment that are meant to involve you, the observer. We should define miracles by their impact and effect on the observers rather than defining them in terms of a philosophical world system that may or may not be a valid account of reality under God. Some miracles in Scripture clearly involve the power of new creation; others would be called special providences—remarkable coincidences that occur in situations where desperate people have been praying. I have no problem in calling these coincidences “miracles,” nor in calling both types of miracles “signs and wonders.” I think the phrase is a very good one, as it is certainly a very scriptural one, to describe these extraordinary events.

Tim Warner: I went to the mission field with a lot of good theology but very poor practice, and I’ve come to realize that in the West we have a better ability to describe our theology than to live it. One of my college professors used to say people may not live what they profess, but they will always live what they believe. And so, while I may say the Holy Spirit’s power is real power that operates on all levels of life, that power is something I theologize about, but not something that becomes functional in my everyday life.

Now our whole Western culture has basically told us that the world is constructed around the operation of neutral scientific law. The cause-and-effect relationships in our world can be explained scientifically, not spiritually. The effect is that the idea of spirit is not a functional concept to the average Westerner—and I would include many theologians in that category. We can believe that it is the Holy Spirit that effects conversion. We see changes in lives. But when you begin to talk about Satan and demons, healing, and other spiritual gifts, many Christians have a hard time accepting these concepts.

Kantzer: Do you believe the Holy Spirit ultimately controls the material as well as the spiritual world?

Warner: Yes. Missionary bishop Lesslie Newbigin states that evangelical missionaries have been one of the most secularizing forces in the world. For example, we go to the mission field and say, “It is not spirits that make your plants grow or not grow.” Even though we start by saying God created the world, we’ve become functional deists who say God went back to heaven and is sitting on his throne letting his creation run according to natural law. I think what we should have said to them is: “This is a God-created world. There is a law built into it that says if you do things God’s way, you get God’s results; if you do things your way, you get your results. And God has enabled us to understand that his creation was made so that if we put this and this together, then we get God’s results.”

It’s the same way with medicine. We tend to make this dichotomy between scientific medicine and healing as though there were no continuity between the work of God and my thanking him that I can take the antimalarials and not get malaria when I go to Africa. I would say you can’t understand life without a constant reference to the supernatural.

Wimber: The biggest difficulty I’ve had with miracles is that they do not fit in terms of our world view. We’re twentieth-century materialists, we’re rationalists, so we look for natural, materialistic clarifications of things. And I’m not any different from most people. So I’ve had to struggle with things that I’ve seen.

Let me give an illustration. I was in Melbourne, Australia, last year, and the Lord gave me an impression, what we call a “word of knowledge,” while I was ministering. So I said to the audience, “There’s a woman here with a cleft palate. You’ve had two surgeries on the palate to try to resolve it. They’ve taken your teeth. You now wear a bridge. And the name Emma will be very precious to you. This is a sign to you that God wants to heal your palate.” The woman came out of the audience, and a Christian surgeon became very concerned. He said, “Do you understand what you’ve promised that woman?” This is an area of concern that everyone has about healing. You don’t want to promise more than you can deliver.

So he explained rather ardently for ten minutes the nature of bones and how the cranium was a bone and that the inside of the mouth was a bone. “Do you understand what a mature bone is like?” he said. “You have to surgically break that bone in order for this palate to come together.”

And I said, “All I can tell you is what God told me, and I believe that if you’ll go join the prayer group you’ll watch this woman get healed.” He just looked at me as if I had six heads!

Three days later the woman’s palate closed. So the surgeon hurried her off to his offices and examined her, giving us one of those miracles that is authenticated by surgical medicine.

My point is that I don’t have any confidence in words of knowledge. All I have confidence in is God. If 100 people with cleft palates came up to me today, I probably wouldn’t have any confidence that they would be healed. The initiation has to be through God. I cannot promise it. But I knew in that moment that there was authorization to tell that woman if she came forward God would bless her.

Packer: The event John has described appears to be an act of creation in the strictest sense. But the difference between that and a significant coincidence is hardly important: both are “signs and wonders.” What entitles us to call them miracles—signs, wonders, works of power—is that they call our attention to God omnipotently at work before our eyes, with a purpose of involving us in what he is doing.

Warner: I do not view miracles as God temporarily suspending natural law, because that way of thinking tends to equate the world as God created it with the world under the effects of sin. It’s not that God sets aside natural law, because that would be having to set aside his own works. What he sets aside are the effects of sin in the world, demonstrating what the kingdom is about. So Jesus said, “If I by the Spirit of God cast out demons, that is the kingdom of God come upon you.” It’s not that I have the potential in me to use power, but I have the Holy Spirit in me. If he chooses to work through me, the only thing stopping him is my lack of faith or obedience.

Ryrie: Should we expect God to do a miracle for somebody who has little or no faith? Should we have expected that God would have healed that cleft palate if the woman hadn’t confessed her sin? What extent is faith, confession, and forgiving involved in seeing that in fact a miracle will be done? You seemed to say, John, that God would do it sovereignly regardless of the faith or lack of it in the person.

Wimber: There are at least three dynamics involved in healing: the faith of the person being prayed for, the faith of friends or family, and the faith of the person praying. There’s a possibility that God sovereignly will initiate healing for his own reasons outside of the context of people. But I think that would be rare.

Packer: The person whose paradigm doesn’t include the possibility of miracles is sure in advance that every extraordinary event can be explained in natural terms, without reference to God. The resurrection of Jesus is the supreme example of this. Plenty of people down the centuries have been presented with the reasons for recognizing Jesus’ resurrection as fact and have seen the impossibility, on present knowledge, of producing an explanation in other terms of the actual evidence, yet they still have not been persuaded that God raised Jesus from the dead. It remains an article of their secular faith that the empty tomb, the resurrection appearances, and all experience of the living Christ from that day to this, can be explained somehow in non-Christian terms.

Kantzer: So when something extraordinary happens that could be explained in terms of God allowing natural laws to run their course, is this a miracle?

Packer: Yes, from my standpoint it may be so; but we shall be in danger if we maximize the concept of miracle to such an extent that everything that turns out strikingly well is classed as a miracle. If we follow that line too far, we’ll have cheapened the category to the point where “miracle” only means “something nice.” To be a miracle, an event must strike us as a special sign from God, showing us that he is here and active and has done this extraordinary thing to bless us by strengthening our faith right now.

Briscoe: In other words, the difference between what is a miracle to one person and what is a miracle to another is their frame of reference: Either they think it’s the natural world, or they think the kingdom is invading.

Packer: Yes, though I don’t like to speak of the kingdom “breaking in” and “invading,” for those words seem to me to suggest a deistic view of the created order as such. I would prefer to say that the kingdom is a present reality, and has been so since Christ’s first coming, and that the risen Lord, the Holy Spirit, and the “powers of the age to come” are realities of the kingdom. It seems to me biblically right that we should expect impressive things—“wonders”—to happen now, and keep happening: “wonders of grace,” as the old hymn put it. There will be something intrinsically miraculous about the acts of the kingdom.

Kantzer: I have generally tended to define the difference between a miracle and a special providence as in the way in which God does things in the natural world. Everything that happens, I think, the Spirit of God does. The question is in terms of means. In one case, God uses the natural laws of cause and effect. And in the other case, he breaks in with his immediate power. But in both cases he is breaking in, so to speak, and controlling the situation.

Packer: I am still unhappy about “breaking in,” but I continue to urge that miracles of coincidence (special providences that show God’s power and love) are just as truly miracles as are God’s works of creative power in which the happening cannot be explained in terms of what went before—like Jesus’ resurrection, and the raising of Lazarus, and the character-change involved in each Christian’s new birth. Here’s a story: Just after her conversion, my wife, standing at the bus stop to catch a bus to a meeting she needed to attend, realized she had no money for the fare. She prayed, felt it right to get on the bus anyway, took a seat, and found herself sitting next to her uncle, whom she had no reason to expect to see there, but who at once bought her ticket in the generous way that uncles do. For her, that was a miracle—a miracle of coincidence, certainly, but no less a miracle for that; it was a wonderful sign, bringing her powerful encouragement from God, and that was what made it a miracle.

Cause-and-effect language makes me anxious, for it can so easily lead to the deistic thinking about the world that we need to get away from. The Western world has been talking of cause and effect since the sixteenth century, using the words to describe the regular correlations in the created order that God upholds, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as we think of the correlations theistically, as regularities directly upheld by God every moment, and not deistically, as facets of a world order that God withdrew from after he had set it going. But what needs saying in these deistic days is that God is involved in everything, and sometimes he acts in a way that calls attention to his presence, power, and purpose—whether through coincidence or some working of a regularity (a “natural law”) of which the person at the receiving end has no understanding, or through genuinely new-creative exercise of his power. Every Christian’s new birth should be seen as miraculous: it is the biggest sign and wonder that ever occurs anywhere since the resurrection of Jesus.

Briscoe: Recently a dear friend of mine and an elder in the church was voted by his peers as the surgeon they would go to if they needed surgery. We were talking very late in the night after an elders meeting. He had to operate at 7:00 A.M. And he said he had a very, very complicated procedure. In that particular procedure, there was a critical 20-minute period in which he had to do a renal arterial graft, which, if it wasn’t done within 20 minutes, would cause the whole renal system to collapse.

By the time he was operating I had completely forgotten about it, but I had the strongest urge to pray for him. When I saw him a couple of days later, I asked him about the surgery. He said he had been in the middle of the critical 20-minute period when the patient went into cardiac arrest. It took him half an hour to resuscitate the patient, making it practically useless to continue with the procedure. But continue he did, and that patient has completely recovered. As soon as the procedure was over, he gathered everybody around the patient, looked at them one by one, and said, “Account for that.” He is totally comfortable with saying that God not only worked through the normal processes, but did something unusual.

Kantzer: But what brought on that miracle? Did the surgeon pray as he tried to revive the patient? Has God promised to work miracles if we meet the proper condition?

Spittler: I admit bafflement in the presence of clear texts in the Gospels where it sounds as if all I need to do is pray and the answer comes, not just for healing, but not excluding healing, either.

Kantzer: Every one of us knows about those verses. How do you interpret those texts?

Spittler: I see Scripture as full of models or metaphors. One is the relationship where God is the heavenly father and I’m a child of God. I don’t know any better way to understand prayer or to understand those words of Jesus than the model that is given to me as a parent of a child who will ask me to the full extent of that child’s ability. Being older and more experienced, I will respond from a different level of understanding. Therefore, when I pray in Jesus’ name, I will ask, I will trust, and I will believe; but I will also do it in the confidence that God is omniscient. As a parent, I know things the child doesn’t know, and it wouldn’t do any good for me to try to explain them to that child.

Kantzer: And no judgment on the child?

Spittler: No judgment on the child; and yet that trust is a marvel.

There are times when God does providential things that make me want to say, “I wish I had prayed for that.” It would make a great testimony, because then I could say, “See what God did as a result of my prayers!” We talk about unanswered prayer. But I have to talk about unprayed answers as well. The Father knows what will be appropriate and suitable for his child.

Briscoe: But there are two views on how to pray for miracles. If I pray “according to God’s will,” it seems as if I have no faith; but if I pray boldly for God to perform a miracle, it seems as if I’m trying to force God to do my will.

Spittler: I know too well about the excesses in the “name-it-and-claim-it” movement, but in my life there have been perhaps one or two gifted moments when it seemed appropriate to pray that way.

Briscoe: John, you spoke earlier about the “word of knowledge.” Does that sort of experience take you out of the realm of belief and unbelief and put you into a realm of tremendous certainty?

Wimber: Yes, and I find support for this concept in Ephesians 6. My perception of that text is that taking “the sword of the Spirit” does not necessarily mean memorizing the written Word of God. For me it speaks of listening for and living out the powerful voice of God that comes to us in the form of impressions.

Stuart, I believe God gave you an impression to pray for your surgeon friend. That urgency came by the Spirit, allowing you to participate in the miracle of surgery and divine healing.

Warner: Obviously, God knows perfectly things we do not know. And because of the deceptiveness of our minds, we may think we have met his conditions when, in fact, we haven’t. James says, “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures” (James 4:3). So we may be asking for perfectly legitimate things, but for wrong motives. Sometimes miracles are withheld because God knows ultimately we will not give him the glory. If God knows that a miracle isn’t going to produce worship—that it’s simply man’s desire to see something sensational—he may withhold the miracle. And sometimes God will not heal because of unconfessed sin. The deceptiveness of the mind often interferes with what we think are prayers of faith when actually our faith is impeded by sin.

Kantzer: Would you want to broaden that to say that when God does not answer, it is always because there is sin in the life of the individual seeking a miracle?

Wimber: That’s important to point out. For instance, we read in Psalm 74:9–11, where the Israelites were given no miraculous signs, no prophets, and so on. This and several other texts would imply that the absence of the signs and wonders is a concern of Scripture and may be traced to sin.

Kantzer: We seem to agree that God has not promised to any individual that he will answer our prayers, even if we personally meet his conditions. Now the other side of the question is: Has God promised for the church as a whole that in every generation the church may expect miracles?

Wimber: I think what we’re really asking is: Does God give us a specific formula that will always get prayer answered? Personally, I don’t see anything in the Scripture that supports that idea. But when you take texts like the ask-and-you-shall-receive text in Matthew 7 and Luke 11, or the prayer-and-anointing-for-healing text in James 5, there is an inclusive suggestion that God has committed himself to be responsive to the church. So when a church comes and prays, God hears, God acts. But what he may do may not be what we ask for.

Perhaps more than all of you I have a continually expanding group of disgruntled people who have come for healing and don’t get it. Some are healed, but there are always some who aren’t. So I have to deal with this problem all the time, and one of the things that has helped me is to explain that God is more than father—he is also judge. We can come to him as a father and expect him to hear, but he may not always respond in the way that we would like. But we can trust his response because it is ultimately right. The reason for his response will be revealed to us, either on earth or in heaven.

Ryrie: I think that’s important to point out. God always answers prayer. I like your word respond. God may not respond the way I want him to, but that doesn’t mean his ear is not open to the cries of his children, because it is.

Packer: Prayer for a miracle is no more, just as it is no less, than asking God to meet the need that you are praying about in a way that will impress those who know as a sign and a wonder. There cannot be anything wrong with inviting God to show his hand in that way. But it would be wrong either to insist he do things in a spectacular way, or to take the position that God never does anything in a spectacular way anymore, and we mustn’t look for him to do that.

Kantzer: Charles, I would expect you as a dispensationalist to disagree with that. At least, I have read other dispensationalists who have directly opposed the idea of miracles being the norm for this age.

Ryrie: I do not think dispensationalism as a system of theology requires the cessation of gifts. Some dispensationalists believe some gifts have ceased, and that they can support this exegetically and historically. But I don’t think the system requires that.

Ultradispensationalism—a more extreme system—does require and teach that the sign gifts are no longer available to man. But I think most dispensationalists have been wrongly accused of not believing in miracles. Most of us believe what Dr. Packer has just said—that the miracles are given to authenticate the Lord and the apostles. That’s what Hebrews 2:4 is saying. God did that for a purpose in that day. Whether he’s doing it today is another question. Many people who believe that the gifts of tongues and healings are operative today would not believe that the gift of apostleship is. So, in some sense, they are cessationists, too. I don’t think there is any question God can and may do anything he wishes, intervening at any time, in any way. And I don’t think anything precludes that in the exegesis of the Scriptures. Just because I don’t think God is normally giving a particular gift does not mean that God can’t or wouldn’t do it.

Kantzer: Are you saying God chooses not to perform supernatural miracles now, or that he may perform miracles today but it’s not the normal thing?

Ryrie: I don’t want to lessen God’s power in any fashion. Normally, I don’t think he is giving some of those so-called sign gifts today. In tribulation days, he’s going to give the gift of prophecy again. But I don’t personally put much faith in so-called modern prophets.

Kantzer: The question many nondispensationalists have is: Why would God not normally do miraculous things today?

Ryrie: I don’t know the full answer, but at least part of an answer is found in 2 Corinthians, where in chapter 12, Paul said he performed sign miracles, but where in the third chapter, he called believers “letters of reference” and “epistles of commendation.” So maybe part of the reason God does not always heal is to prevent us from focusing more on signs than on the miracle of the New Birth.

But even if one believes the gift of healing is not being given to people today as a way of authenticating our ministry, that does not necessarily mean God does not heal miraculously. In James 5 we do have a command to pray for healing, and a promise that the Lord will raise the sick one up. But it may be a specialized reason that wouldn’t apply to every case.

Briscoe: James 5 seems so pertinent to what we’re talking about. To me, it’s the clearest teaching in the Epistles on miraculous healing. For instance, James talks about the elders being the ones who are involved in this ministry. How does that correspond with the Vineyard’s emphasis on equipping people generally? Also, does that passage refer basically to someone who sinned? The promise in this passage is that you will be “raised up.” What does that mean?

Ryrie: I do not relegate this passage to weakness as some do, but I think it refers to actual sickness. The best that I can come up with is that sin is somehow in the situation. It is a difficult passage, but you are right—it is the clearest passage in the Epistles that says something about healing.

Briscoe: We have made a genuine effort to follow this teaching in our church, and I can testify that we have seen without exception that when people have asked the elders to come and we’ve ministered to them in this way, we have seen God raise them up in one way or another. Sometimes there has been physical healing, but always there has been a tremendous sense of uplift and encouragement.

Ryrie: Whatever James 5 means, it has not ceased to apply to today. I want to affirm that.

Kantzer: And it could include miraculous healings, though not necessarily limited to that?

Ryrie: Absolutely.

Warner: We’ve been talking about healing almost entirely in a physical sense, but the church has every bit as much need for spiritual and emotional healing. I’m afraid the church has sold out to secular psychology for this kind of healing. I feel strongly about this, because I work with the castoffs of the psychological system. When victims of satanic abuse come to us, they are beyond what anybody can do for them aside from the healing power of the Spirit. I contend that the church accepts physical healing almost more readily than emotional or spiritual healing.

Packer: But if James 5:14–15 is interpreted as a magic spell that enables us to command and control the power of God in healing the body, we are falling from faith in God’s faithfulness into superstition, which will certainly lead to frustration and disappointment. Prayers for healing, like other petitions, must have as their bottom line “thy will be done,” not “mine if it is against yours, Lord.” But I suspect that many Christians today, seeing this, and knowing that James 5 is not a magic spell for bodily healing, have expectations in this area that are too low, to a point that is really unbelieving and ungodly. One thing that the charismatic movement has been sent to do, I believe, is to alert us all to the fact that God, when trusted, will show his hand in many thrilling ways, and we should be expecting him to do that, though without dictating to him what he must do in particular situations.

Kantzer: I don’t know a single dispensationalist who doesn’t say special providences continue. And since some of us consider special providences miracles, where do we differ?

Spittler: We differ in our expectations. John’s ministry at the Vineyard is teaching the church to be more expectant of the supernatural. Generally, the mainstream of evangelicalism has not, in the past, really expected a lot of miraculous healings. In my own Pentecostal background, we’ve become much more evangelical since World War II. But in recent years, evangelicalism has borrowed from Pentecostalism so that it is not at all uncommon to find a standard evangelical church conducting a seminar on healing and other spiritual gifts. Our concept of what is normal is expanding.

Packer: John, in your ministry you have felt free to upbraid the church for not expecting miracles. At least, that is how you have been perceived.

Wimber: That’s not exactly accurate.

Packer: But surely you have emphasized that the church has neglected healing and not regularly prayed for the sick, and urged that we should jolly well start this ministry right now.

Wimber: What I’ve been urging and admonishing the church about is equipping the saints. That’s the bottom line for the work of service, which includes healing. And the only reason I’ve talked so often on healing is that there is a dearth of good evangelical teaching in this arena.

Iii. Where Can We Agree?

Kantzer: We have pretty much agreed that the Holy Spirit provides power enabling the believer to serve God in ways that otherwise might be impossible. Now how does the believer apply this to everyday living?

Ryrie: That’s an excellent question, because for most people, this is what really matters. They work 40 hours a week, they get two or three weeks’ vacation, they don’t have much spectacular going on in their lives, but they want to think they are just as pleasing to God as John Wimber, who stands up in front of thousands of people.

The answer lies in bearing fruit. Some of the specific things we can do is to win people to Christ, produce good works, praise God with our lips, and give freely. I would also encourage people to use their gifts, and one of those gifts is helping others. That’s a great gift. We should not minimize those less spectacular, ordinary activities of the exercise of gifts. I think this would encourage people that they are becoming instruments of the Spirit’s power through the ordinary routine. How do you do it? Romans 8:13 gives us a wonderful model: If I, through the Spirit, put to death deeds of the body, I shall live.

Kantzer: We often forget that the purpose of the gifts is to minister, to meet needs that God sees in the church. Our concentration is too often on getting a gift rather than on meeting a need.

Warner: One of the things that contributes to our difficulty with the whole idea of the Holy Spirit is the tendency to subjectivism. If you would look through the average evangelical hymnbook in the last several generations, you would have a hard time finding half a dozen hymns that are really addressed to God in objective worship. If worship isn’t an encounter with Deity, it isn’t really worship—no matter how much we manipulate emotions. Because of that, the whole supernatural world lacks reality. So I would recommend more objective kinds of worship.

We can only live to God’s glory when we are living with the power of God in our lives. We can only do that when we know God. If Satan can keep us from worship, our religious activity doesn’t worry him. We’ve worked ourselves to death, but without power.

I would also recommend memorizing Scripture. In spiritual warfare, nothing is more powerful than quoting Scripture. If we start talking about the gifts of power and the Holy Spirit before we refurbish worship and our attention to the Word, we are going to be especially susceptible to impotence.

Packer: We need to keep reminding ourselves that without the Lord we can do nothing. It needs to become a habit of mind with us to tell the Lord as we tackle each task, “I can’t do this without your help, please help me,” and then to expect to be helped because we have admitted our helplessness, given up self-reliance, and are now looking to him. Self-reliance is a great evil, producing what used to be called “the energy of the flesh.” But when we rely on the Lord, the Spirit will empower us to do what otherwise we couldn’t do.

Kantzer: How important is it that believers totally agree on this subject of the Holy Spirit and power? Should one’s view of miracles, for example, be a condition for church membership or ordination to the ministry? Is unity within evangelicalism threatened by diversity on this subject within the framework of sound doctrine?

Packer: None of the varieties of view that we have shared today should disqualify anyone from membership or ministry in any church; they are variations within a common evangelical theology, and it would be sectarian to make acceptance of a brother Christian depend on him or her agreeing with one of us rather than another on the matters we have discussed.

Briscoe: One of the hallmarks of the church should be its ability to experience unity in the face of diversity. In fact, unity is a product of the Spirit’s work in producing patience, love, generosity, and care. I would be reluctant to see one’s view of the Spirit’s power lead to a tightening up of the requirements for ordination to the ministry in our church.

Spittler: We need to allow different traditions to work out their understanding of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we can do opposite actions in the name of the Lord, but that’s a splinter of our fallenness. All of us are called toward God, and some of the things we’ve talked about are ways in which we can advance toward God. Just what that means for us individually we have to find out.

As far as I know, Jesus didn’t speak in tongues, but on the other hand, he probably couldn’t be ordained in some of your churches because he never graduated from seminary. So we all have ways of fixing the shapes of our traditions, our local churches. We need to recognize that in a global, historical sense these differences are not very important.

Warner: Initially it’s much easier to agree on a theological level than a practical level. While we have agreed at many points, when it comes to practicing the supernatural gifts, such as healing and the casting out of demons, I suspect we would have more disagreement. What do we do about it? Just what we’re doing today—meeting each other face to face and honestly examining our differences in a spirit of Christian love. That kind of interaction is bound to show us we have more in common than we think. And it certainly pleases the Spirit more than our fighting.

Wimber: When I first accepted this invitation I had some reservations. I have been misrepresented many times, and I was not about to enter a situation that might have contributed to that. But the Lord clearly said he wanted me here, and now I understand why. We’ve gone a long way toward clearing up misunderstandings, and that, I think, will be a major contribution to the body of Christ.

Kantzer: And yet, we cannot minimize the differences among us. For example, would you encourage a person in your congregation to become an elder who had the view that God really doesn’t give miracles in our day?

Wimber: No. That person would have great difficulty pastoring a flock that’s being taught to expect miracles. But I have a man on my staff who doesn’t speak in tongues, which is something else our church believes in. When I interviewed him, I said I didn’t care if he ever agreed with us about tongues, as long as he didn’t sow dissension. And he hasn’t.

Packer: For years I’ve been saying that people who worship God through the use of a liturgy ought to visit those who don’t and vice versa. I would add that those who practice a ministry of gifts in the style that’s been described by John or Tim ought to visit those of us who do it a different way and vice versa. It’s not enough just to read about each other’s styles. We need to have personal experience as visitors. Our own appreciation for each other requires this.

Clearly, the spirit of God is leading us out nowadays into a plurality of styles, in worship, devotion, and church activity. The idea that one pattern of worship and congregational life could fit the whole Christian world is really sillier today than it ever was.

Ryrie: Each of us thinks we’re right, and I don’t see anything wrong with feeling it’s our responsibility to promote our particular interpretation of truth. I would be a little more restrictive about qualifications for ministry. You are right, John, not to want an elder who didn’t believe in healing. Some of my friends wouldn’t want one that did. And God blesses us both. We shouldn’t fight each other, because there really isn’t any contradiction between having different preferences and loving each other.

After John Wesley’s “Aldersgate experience,” the spiritually recharged Anglican churchman became much more open to the notion of supernatural expressions of the Holy Spirit than were many of his contemporaries. He refused to reject the emotionalism exhibited by many of his converts as well as that of the “French prophets,” the most radical French Protestant immigrants. He even acknowledged that trances, healings, miracles, and other extraordinary events might occur in the lives of believers (though he later said such signs were not in themselves necessarily an indication of the Holy Spirit at work).

Fellow evangelist George Whitefield complained increasingly of this tendency in Wesley’s thought. While he did not discredit emotion as a legitimate expression of what they both called “living” faith, he felt it was not the primary focus of the Spirit’s work.

Wesley and Whitefield differed in much the way contemporary Christians do over the question of power and the Holy Spirit. For although Christians through the ages have generally agreed that the Holy Spirit offers “power” to the believer, differences over describing the nature of that power have led to the development of separate schools of thought. Today’s opposing camps of charismatic pentecostalism and fundamentalist dispensationalism are merely two features of a landscape inhabited by a number of finely nuanced interpretations of the kind of power made available by the Holy Spirit.

Who Will Receive Power?

Discussions of the Holy Spirit’s power must begin with the feast of Pentecost, where, as Jesus had prophesied, the disciples received power after the Holy Spirit had fallen upon them. When Peter preached to Gentiles gathered at the home of Cornelius, wrote Luke, the apostle heard the members of Cornelius’s household “speaking in tongues and extolling God.” He reported that the Spirit “fell on them just as on us at the beginning.” Paul, who was not present at Pentecost, had his own personal manifestation of the Holy Spirit after the disciple Ananias laid hands on him and restored his sight. This experience, along with the Damascus Road vision of Jesus as God’s divine Son, gave him a sense of forgiveness of sins, a hunger for inward purity, and love for both God and human beings.

Both Paul and Peter thereafter made various references to the “gifts of the Spirit,” including healing and the ability to speak a human language that they had not known before. Paul added the gifts of prophecy, discernment, faith, knowledge, and administrative ability. Some think that 1 Corinthians 14 provides evidence that Paul also believed some of his converts spoke with an ecstatic prayer language.

In any case, Paul, Peter, and the author of the letters attributed to John made such “gifts” secondary to the Holy Spirit’s work in cleansing the heart and perfecting it in love. And the first generations of Christians followed this apostolic lead by making the recognition of any particular gift dependent on the Christian’s experience of the fullness of love.

What, then, ought we to mean when we refer to the Holy Spirit’s power? Jesus greatly enriched the content of this idea he had inherited from the prophets. The Hebrew Scriptures record many manifestations of God’s power. Indeed, John the Baptist’s phrase, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” summarized a great promise—that the Holy Spirit was about to bring humankind the power to make God’s rule on earth a moral reality. The Spirit would empower believers to overcome their sinful nature and demonstrate the kingdom attributes, such as righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.

For this reason, all Christians believe that the “power of God” was evident in the lives of such people as Francis of Assisi and David Brainerd, and is today revealed in the piety of Mother Teresa and others who subjugate themselves to the highest biblical standards of devotion and service. The validity of their Christian experience is apparent, because we equate spiritual with moral power.

Conversely, we are wary, as were Luther and Calvin, of those who seem to substitute mere human emotion for the Holy Spirit’s work in transforming the moral natures of men and women. In the early church, opponents attributed the “heresy” of Montanus to a preoccupation with miraculous gifts. But 1,500 years later, Wesley concluded that the chorus of disapproval confronting Montanus may have stemmed from the effort of “rich and honourable Christians, who will always have numbers as well as power on their side,” to ridicule the real faith of “one of the holiest men of the second century.” Wesley believed it likely that Montanus made obedience to divine law and love for God and humankind central, but put stronger emphasis than others did upon manifestations of power that seemed to flow from being filled with the Spirit.

Indeed, the Swiss and Dutch Anabaptists thought that Luther and Calvin placed too much emphasis on the inward aspect of faith and too little on outward obedience to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. Accordingly, the Mennonite heirs of the Anabaptists have emphasized throughout their history the suffering that obeying Jesus’ injunction to follow him often brought.

Likewise, in both old and New England, Puritans declared that the power of the Holy Spirit was manifested in the experience of regeneration and in the Christian’s subsequent pursuit of holiness. The revival of the emphasis on sanctification by their modern followers, thanks to evangelical scholars such as Richard Lovelace, seems a testimony to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Wesley taught his own preachers that the Spirit would, in answer to prayer, bring each person the “prevenient grace” that enables fallen human beings to receive and believe God’s promises of regenerating and sanctifying faith. Methodists taught that this grace would release seekers from the notion of predestination and convince them that freedom of the human will was not a natural inheritance but a gift of God’s Spirit. Wesley thought the early Moravian pietists agreed with him, although they were not, in his view, clear enough on the necessity of complete obedience or on the extent of the perfection in love that should flow from the work of the Spirit.

Certainly American Puritans of Jonathan Edwards’s era—that is, of Wesley’s time—allowed no substitution of miraculous “gifts” and manifestations of great “spiritual power” for loyal obedience to the commands of Christ. Here the Puritans and Wesley agreed more closely than modern theological arguments between so-called Arminians and Reformed Evangelicals would lead us to believe. Both Wesley and the Puritans thought George Fox’s “Quakers,” as they were derisively called, were far too much given to emotionalism; and they believed Fox’s Society of Friends relied insufficiently on Scripture to restrain demonstrations of what they called the Holy Spirit’s power.

Religion Of The Heart

In the revivals that swept America during the nineteenth century, Charles G. Finney moved slowly over to the Methodist doctrine of entire sanctification. But from the very first, Finney emphasized that the “religion of the heart” was manifest in love and purity rather than emotional signs. Repeatedly he called for that change in the will, which he thought was the true manifestation of the Spirit’s power.

So with later evangelicals during the nineteenth century. The preaching of the Keswick “higher life” evangelists, such as R. A. Torrey, as well as that of the holiness movement, which flourished among American Methodists and some Friends, Congregationalists, Baptists, and German-speaking members of the Evangelical and United Brethren denominations, agreed with Wesley. Like the Puritans and Finney, they thought obedience and love were both the real and realistic signs of the Holy Spirit’s presence.

In the twentieth century, however, a widespread popular revival has grown steadily, which emphasizes precisely those “gifts” that Wesley and Whitefield thought were secondary. Yet this emphasis on “signs and wonders” has ancient Christian roots, a fact that should not be forgotten. It gives expression to the widespread feeling that when God is at work, sensational things will happen: healings, miracles of various sorts, incredibly rapid conversions, prophetical insight into the future, and the removal of barriers of language that many Christians believe have divided humankind since the Tower of Babel.

The openness of Roman Catholic faith to the miraculous during recent centuries has done much to reinforce this common view that one can expect sensational miracles from God. Especially evident in both America and Europe is the popularity of shrines such as that of Our Lady of Lourdes, in France (where thousands have claimed healing, though the church has only certified about one hundred), Saint Anne de Beaupre, in Canada, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Italian Harlem. There and elsewhere, sacred relics alleged to be descended from Jesus and the apostles seemed to believers to help them have faith for healing. In addition, Catholics frequently called on various persons their church had elevated to sainthood to intercede with the Holy Trinity for such temporal favors as health, personal safety, and individual success. The reporting of alleged answers to these prayers helped to inspire widespread belief that faith in God’s Spirit was a key to power in human affairs as well as divine ones.

The theological upheaval of the Protestant Reformation polarized Protestants and Catholics on miracles, as on many issues. Catholics had traditionally looked to miracles to authenticate the ministry and teaching of the church. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621) taunted his Protestant opponents: If they taught the truth, he asked, where indeed were their miracles?

Perhaps in reaction to this challenge, Protestant theology developed in a different direction, saying that while miracles could happen and the way of prayer was always open, the magisterial power to work miracles had been withdrawn after the Apostolic Age. The sacraments, not miracles, were now the seals of the Word.

In our own time, the Pentecostal revival and the charismatic renewal movement have become major forces in Christendom. Thanks to those influences and increased contact with Third World Christians, there has been a renewed expectation among many believers that the Spirit will authenticate both their personal experience and their corporate evangelism with extraordinary happenings and spiritual manifestations. Old tensions have been reborn between those who emphasize power for holy living and those who focus on the extraordinary and emotional. Historians must now watch and listen before writing the rest of the story.

You’re sitting in a Bible study or Sunday-school class when the leader asks for prayer requests. Someone mentions her son who has cancer. Someone else is unemployed but will be going to an interview. Yet another has an important decision to make. The leader calls on you to pray.

You wish there was someone there who would pray with the confidence of the apostles, the first followers endowed by the Spirit with special gifts of healing, knowledge, and wisdom. But not expecting a visit from Saint Peter, you clear your throat and begin, “Our Father …”

What will you say in your prayer? Will you ask God to heal the boy? To do it if it is “in his will”? Will you pray for special intervention on behalf of the man looking for work?

Do you think your prayers will do any good?

In faith, of course you do. Few Christians would think of asking God simply to let things run their course. We expect God to do something because we believe he is all powerful. And yet, earnest followers of Christ approach this notion of power differently. Some would boldly ask God to remove tumors, create new jobs, or give clear words of knowledge. Others give God a little more room and live with lower expectations, praying more for power that gives us grace and peace to endure suffering and unpleasant conditions.

Does it take more power to remove a tumor than it does to heal the fear and anger of a young man dying?

These are not easy questions, and for too long their difficulty has contributed to the forming of factions within the body of Christ.

Differences over our understanding of the Holy Spirit and power will most likely continue until our Lord’s return, but that should not excuse us from finding common ground and, perhaps, learning from each other. It was in that spirit that we invited seven Christian leaders to join us for a discussion of the Holy Spirit’s power:

Charles Ryrie taught for 26 years at Dallas Theological Seminary and developed the popular Ryrie Study Bible.

James I. Packer teaches theology at Regent College and is a senior editor of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

Stuart Briscoe, pastor of the Elmbrook Church in Waukesha, Wisconsin, is the author of several books, including Everyday Discipleship for Ordinary People.

Timothy Warner teaches missiology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has served as a missionary to Africa.

Russell P. Spittler teaches New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, where he directs the David du Plessis Center for Christian Spirituality.

John Wimber pastors the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, California, and has coauthored (with Kevin Springer) Power Evangelism and Power Healing.

Kenneth S. Kantzer is the dean of the Christianity Today Institute and serves as chancellor at Trinity College.

We also asked Timothy Smith, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, to trace some of the ways our forebears thought about the Holy Spirit.

In the black church, soul is not a philosophical category; it is the total response of the person to God.

I grew up in an interracial church alongside white folks who had chosen to remain in the church even though the neighborhood was changing. In our congregation, African Americans were the majority. But we learned to do what blacks and whites in most churches have been unable to do: love each other and live together in community.

This kind of church reflects the scriptural vision for bringing Christians of all races (and all denominational affiliations) together around a love for Christ. The foundation of such an integrated community of faith is a spirituality that draws upon both black and white traditions in order to move us closer to Christ.

Unfortunately, many Christians have never taken the time to learn from Christian communities outside their own. Black churches, white churches, Hispanic churches, and Asian-American churches usually keep to themselves. In my associations with Christian organizations, I have discovered that white Christians often do not take the views of black believers seriously. There is rarely any intentional or overt prejudice. But white Christians sometimes assume that black Christians are not theologically sophisticated because not many of them are trained scholars. But I appeal to white believers: Listen to the voices of African-American Christians as you progress on your spiritual journey. Learn about the “soul spirituality” of the black church. Only thus can we all move closer to God and to each other.

Soul Food

Within the black community, soul is a code word for many items and experiences: black cooking is often called “soul food”; certain music is branded “soul music”; and many blacks refer to one another (and some nonblacks) as “soul brothers” and “soul sisters.” There are even special soul handshakes.

Soul expresses the essence of the inner life. In the Bible, soul is the equivalent of life, the spiritual substance that can enter into a relationship with God. Many Christians try to be precise about their notion of the soul, making careful distinctions between the soul, spirit, mind, will, and emotions. But such microscopic divisions are not very helpful, for all of these concepts overlap in the Bible.

Unfortunately, Western evangelical culture tends to process experience more through the head than the heart. Before we can see something is valid, we need to understand it through our intellects. We criticize people who are predominantly feeling oriented; we suspect any experience that elicits a strong emotional response. Yet, in our relationships to God, both the intellect and the emotions are vital elements. The concept that connects the two is soul. That is why, in the black religious tradition, the soul is significant. There, soul is not a philosophical category; it is a deeply personal and reflective quality, embracing both intellect and emotion—a total response of the person to God.

Soul spirituality is the act of brooding over one’s life and the world in God’s presence. Soul is moving into a rhythm with God, being sensitive to his heart, thinking his thoughts. The Bible says, “The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10, NIV). As his people, we have received the Spirit. Soul becomes the movement of God’s Spirit in us.

Soul Worship

The black church is one of the most visible expressions of soul spirituality today. Your image of the black church may be a wild, enthusiastic worship service—a robed choir swaying, singing, and clapping in the background; an organ and a drum pounding out the beat; a preacher shouting a gospel message, with his audience joining in.

Your image is not all wrong. Many of the thousands of black churches in America are like that. Some are different, however, more like typical white churches—quiet, “reverent,” hushed.

When I preach in a black church, the people usually participate. I hear “Amen,” “Preach it,” and “That’s right.” I like to hear response. It helps me know that the people in the pew are entering into the message, listening, urging me on, helping with the proclamation of God’s Word. They are expressing soul.

The vocal response in the black service tells me about the congregation’s relationship with God. The amens are a response to God. They make the message into a vehicle for dialogue with the Lord. The worshipers are not just listening to a performance; they are entering fully into community worship.

Soul spirituality is open to the movement of God’s Spirit. African-American Christians do not think you can confine the Spirit to 60 minutes and make him follow a fixed order of worship. We enjoy as much music, testimony, and preaching as possible—all as a gift from God.

The Wellspring Of Soul

The soul that characterizes most black churches was formed in the crucible of oppression and suffering. The history of the black church in America is filled with courageous men and women who put their spirituality on the line in social conflict. Most of their stories are still untold in both black and white churches. Yet the history of these men and women is a rich source of direction in our spiritual journey.

A visit to South Africa revealed to me the place of suffering in the development of soul. In 1980 I spent three weeks there, speaking to audiences of white and black students, and traveling throughout that beautiful but strife-torn land. But although I was a U.S. citizen, I was a black man in a segregated country. I was required to obtain a special pass as an “honorary white” in order to travel in areas of the country where blacks were forbidden.

Using that pass racked me with anguish. It was a constant reminder that because of my blackness I was considered inferior. The pain of this humiliation led me to identify more closely with the suffering millions of black South Africans who cope with the dehumanizing system of apartheid daily.

I was also compelled to reflect more deeply on the black experience in America. I discovered that the insights of black church leaders in South Africa spoke directly to our experience and struggles as black Christians in the United States. Even more important, I recognized that the perspectives of black theologians in South Africa and the United States were instrumental in the development of my concept of spirituality.

Soul, that total person intellectual and emotional response to God, is the by-product of suffering. It was so for the black church in America, which was forged in the flames of slavery and oppression when blacks clung desperately to God and to one another. And it is so today for the black Christians in South Africa who suffer under the inhumanity of apartheid. I have never heard soul expressed more clearly than in a ghetto church in Soweto as the believers sang rhythmically and lustily:

If you believe and I believe,

The Holy Spirit will fall on this place,

And Africa will be saved,

And Africa will be saved.

Clinging To God And Each Other

Black churches in America and South Africa don’t have a corner on soul because they don’t have a corner on suffering. Wherever oppression squeezes groups of Christians together—in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, South Africa, the United States, and elsewhere—the soul spirituality of wholehearted devotion and service can flourish. As a result, the suffering church can teach us a lot about the corporate side of spirituality. Community is the context for the development of the oppressed Christian’s spirituality.

Many Christians have slipped into the error of thinking they can pursue spirituality on their own apart from the church. The suffering church reminds us that it cannot be done. The reason is simple: Jesus embodies himself in the world by means of a community. That is how he makes himself known to the world. The church is a visible sign that he is here. That is why the Lord’s Supper is essential for genuine spirituality. That is also the reason we need others to encourage us in the disciplines of the spiritual life.

Suffering churches have cultivated corporate spirituality partly out of necessity. For example, for blacks the church was the one institution in society where a black person was not dehumanized. He was treated with respect and honor in his church. Whatever his needs—whether they are physical, social, intellectual, or psychological—they could be addressed in the church. The model of community was forged out of oppressive conditions, and this model is tremendously relevant to all who seek genuine spirituality.

A Black Jesus?

In Farewell to Innocence, black South African theologian Allan Boesak makes this startling claim: “To confess Jesus Christ as the Black Messiah is the only true confession of our time.” Boesak does not mean that Jesus was literally a black man. The color of Jesus’ skin is irrelevant. But, according to Boesak, to acknowledge Jesus as black is to recognize him as the oppressed one who came to liberate the oppressed.

Because of the historical experience of black people, blackness is a symbol of oppression and liberation in many societies. Therefore, calling Jesus black is a way of stating a basic truth about his identity and his mission.

What does this mean if you are a white Christian? Must you become black? Literally, no, but symbolically, yes. In order to experience the soul that is derived from the suffering, you must identify with the people whose human dignity has been denied—such as African-American Christians, Vietnamese Christians, or Christians in Communist countries. Put yourself in the shoes of those who, says Boesak, “are trying to come to grips with a thousand dehumanizing facets of life.” Jesus did it. He became like these people. White Christians must find ways to do the same.

I am afraid this view of Jesus makes our relationship to him, in one sense, “political”—that is, having to do with the best interests of the human community. In many situations, we must take sides. We cannot remain neutral and uninvolved with the poor and suffering. If Jesus took their side, how can we do less? All forms of oppression should disturb us and cause our souls unrest. The disciplines of prayer and contemplation should be channeled toward freedom for those who suffer.

Jesus quoted these Old Testament words to describe his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, therefore he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19, NIV).

Many Christians have trouble with this passage. Not sure they should take it literally, they prefer to spiritualize it, focusing more on internal attitudes than on the tangible facts of life. But suffering Christians take it literally as well as spiritually. They know that the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed are real people to Jesus, people to whom the Good News must be delivered. To say that Jesus was only referring to the spiritually poor, blind, imprisoned, and oppressed seems to them to treat the needy as less than human. Their suffering is a total experience—physical and spiritual, intellectual and emotional—and so is the gospel of Christ.

Black Christians who have known slavery, poverty, and oppression so intimately can appreciate the meaning of liberation far better than their white brothers and sisters. The liberation Jesus promises is a complete liberation. It shatters every bondage, including the bondage of the soul to selfishness and the chains of economic slavery. No wonder the black church was in the forefront of the antislavery and civil-rights movements. They had Jesus’ message of liberation, which transforms blacks and whites into people who love each other.

The suffering church has seen the glory of Christ. It has known him as the suffering servant, the man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief. But it has also found him to be God’s chosen one in whom his soul delights.

It is not hard to see why the black view of soul adds great depth to spirituality. The thought of entering into a rhythmic dialogue with God that absorbs everything about us is profound. This is much more than Sunday-school piety. When we touch the heart of God, we are linked to all those whom God loves, especially those who are suffering. Soul helps us feel the pain of someone else’s hurts. It allows us to celebrate the joy of another’s victory. With soul we move beyond our own individuality into an experience of solidarity with all God’s people.

As we flee from the truth about ourselves, the shortest distance between two points is a labyrinth.

During the 1930s in England, criticism of the Third Reich could ruin a person’s name. Warnings of Nazi aggression were called “hysterical.” Those who warned were called “alarmist.” William Manchester in The Last Lion (vol. 2) tells us how for years before 1939, in speech after speech, one newspaper article after another, Winston Churchill hammered away at his own leaders, trying to dent their self-deception.

It seems that the good people in government could not get themselves to believe that the great nation of Germany was in the hands of criminals. Why not? Because if they let themselves believe that, then the possibility of war began to gleam. And almost nobody in England could think realistically of war. Desperate, crimson memories from World War I were too fresh.

Fifty years later we know some of the cost of that self-deception.

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

(1 John 1:8)

Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon in which the same person is deceiver and deceived. We become our own dupes.

The phenomenon is familiar to most of us. We know folks who deceive themselves about aging. Using the latest slang, fashions, or even surgical techniques, they cling to their image of a youthful self.

For the last ten years, insurance companies have published people’s accounts of their auto accidents. People offer explanations like this: “The telephone pole was approaching. I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.” Or this, “As I approached the intersection, a hedge sprang up, obscuring my vision.” Try this: “I was driving along when suddenly a cow went under my car without once signaling its intentions. I’ve since heard that the unfortunate creature was slow-witted.”

We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But in his letter, John is not talking so much about the little self-deceptions of vanity or self-preservation. John is talking about sin. He is talking about vital lies at the heart of human life and human households and human relationships. He is talking about vital lies at the heart of our relationship to God.

Why do some spouses miss all the signs of infidelity in their partners? Why do alcoholics and other drug abusers typically go through years of denying there is a problem? Why is the revelation of incest an astonishment to people who are living right in the middle of it?

People cannot face the terrible truth of self-deception. The pain and guilt are too great. The implications are too frightening. The need for a new life is too plain. So they take to their hearts one reassuring lie after another.

But why do we keep saying “they”? Why deceive ourselves? This text has our own names folded into it. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

We stand in a long and notorious tradition. Self-deception is as old as the Fall. Adam and Eve knew God as the luminous provider. They had walked with God and leaned on God and tapped deeply into God as the source of all joy. But then the great deceiver goes to work. And Adam and Eve begin to believe a vital lie. God is not a loving father but a jealous tyrant. God is perversely and selfishly trying to keep the top job in the universe for himself.

Off it goes, down the ages—the history of self-deception in a cast of thousands. Aaron cannot imagine how the golden calf popped right into existence. David is indignant that a rich man should seize a poor man’s lamb. Peter is outraged at the suggestion that he is capable of denying our Lord.

And so it is with us. We tell ourselves that our bad temper is righteous indignation, that our spouse cannot handle the same levels of freedom we reserve for ourselves. We convince ourselves that it is others who are privileged and we who are deprived. Our radar detectors are there to remind us to slow down to a safe speed. Our happy-hour gossip is an information service.

What is scary about self-deception is not just that it colors who we are and how we think, nor even that it puts the best face on our sins. What is scary about self-deception is that it can insulate us against Jesus Christ. When we are larded over with lies about our self-sufficiency, when we are buttressed with such sure defenses as repression and denial and pride—when these things defend us and rescue us and pump up our self-image whenever it loses pressure, then the thought that we need Jesus our Savior is impertinent. It is unnecessary. It is entirely uninteresting.

That is why in 1 Corinthians Paul tells us to examine ourselves, feeling for lumps in our hearts, testing for mixed motives and double-mindedness. What is the real reason my career hasn’t turned out as I had hoped? What is the real reason people don’t always trust me? Why do I so often feel spiritually dowdy and vaguely depressed? Why do I withhold the word of praise from loved ones who hunger for it? Why am I bored or irritated by calls for social justice? Why do all my romances have starry-eyed beginnings and tearful endings? What accounts for my trouble on the job? Is it really because my boss is too demanding?

Most of all, why does the gospel so often seem alien to me, and why is Jesus Christ so much a stranger?

None of us knows the whole truth in these matters. Surely none of us knows the heart of another. We don’t even know the maze in our own hearts. But we do know this: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”

Hence, the call to self-examination. Of course, constant self-examination is neurotic. But periodically it has to be done. We do self-examination in prayer. We do it in reading the lives of saints and making fearful comparisons. We do it with trusted spouses and friends. We examine ourselves before Holy Communion. With focused honesty and tender openness we must do it. We will say things like this: “O God, I sometimes finesse the truth because I want to seem more competent than I am.”

No, that’s not quite right.

“O God, I sometimes tell lies in order to shore up my pride.” “O Lord, I neglect unhappy persons because I love comfort more than compassion.” “O God, I’m a weak and selfish person whose main desire is to be untroubled.”

But if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

(v. 9)

Searching, honest confession of sin is one antidote to self-deception. That is because eyes that can spot self-deception are usually those that have been cleansed by tears.

“If we confess our sins …” But how do we know we have nailed them all? How do we know we are not deceiving ourselves all over again? How do we know our shifty psyches are not printing out a short list instead of the full account?

We don’t know. Our capacity for self-deception is almost fathomless. There are secret sins hidden even from the most experienced explorers. But all of us who are veteran sinners know a few of the clues. We know the signs that our divided heart has begun to pump out whitewash again. We say to ourselves things like this: “I’m only human.” “Everybody does it.” “I was provoked.” “I did what I had to do.” “I say this for your own good.” “Nobody is hurt by what I do.” “I was only following orders.” “Nobody’s perfect.”

These little red flags tell us it is later than we think. They tell us it is probably time for confession of sin.

One of the strange facts of the universe is that God will never tolerate sin, but he will forgive it. And when we are forgiven, when God forgives and cleanses, it is as if our dark and moldy house has just had all its windows flung open to the cool June breeze. Corners are swept, old grease is scoured away, stairs and sashes are properly repaired. The terrible truth of self-deception is exposed to the light of the world. And we begin to come clean in ways that are full of pain and full of wonder.

Contrary to popular belief, cunning and innocence do not strange bedfellows make.

In a recent issue of Fortune magazine, an article titled “Killer Companies” cites Ray Kroc, the late, legendary genius behind the McDonald’s hamburger success story. Kroc said if a competitor is drowning, you should stick a hose in his mouth. Think of that next time you order your Big Mac and soft drink!

Assertive personal qualities play a huge role in the functioning of our corporate life, in the market system, and in American society at large. And weakness, “wimpiness,” harmlessness, and innocence rarely score competitive advantage. Society cultivates and rewards shrewd, cunning, assertive—even exploitative—behavior.

In this aggressive and competitive context, Christian ethics gives priority to three virtues—harmlessness, shrewdness, and caring—all of which are identified in a seemingly obscure teaching of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew, an instruction that we almost never mention. We will concentrate on the first two of those virtues.

To fully grasp his teaching about these virtues, however, we need to understand the cultural impact of an influential philosopher of competition, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche argued his perspective more than 100 years ago in Germany, his writings vividly capture traits that our competitive marketplace and society often foster.

A Christian “Slave Mentality”?

According to Nietzsche, there are two types of people: slaves and masters. Slave types value serving others and cultivate the virtues of gentleness, harmlessness, protection, innocence, forgiveness, and love. They cling to being nice, self-giving, passive, useful doormats.

For some reason, Nietzsche thought Christian morality nurtured this slave mentality. Jesus gave himself for others, and he even taught that Almighty God forgives. To Nietzsche, however, an “almighty forgiver” was a contradiction in terms: No one forgives out of strength. Christians exuded weakness, he said; their faith did not inspire creative moral leadership, let alone active application of biblical values or critical thinking in the resolution of concrete personal and social problems. Nietzsche claimed that Buddhism, Marxism, utilitarianism, Kantian thought—and Christianity—all supported the same wimpy, harmless, innocent slave mentality.

Words like harmless have potent connotations, this line of thinking goes on to argue, that go beyond the literal meaning. To call someone “harmless” is also to imply—in our language as in Nietzsche’s—that he or she is wimpy, uninformed, weak, and ineffective, not just one who avoids doing harm. Similarly, the word innocent means more than “not guilty.” “George is an innocent” often means that George is ignorant, out of touch, ineffective, nonthreatening, or even stupid or retarded.

Our society, our economy, our political structures all tolerate and even take advantage of such harmless and innocent people. In our own language and culture, the “harmless” and “innocent” are not forces with which our society must contend, but consumer blocs and voting factions that can be exploited.

Masters Of The Universe

Nietzsche describes the kind of person he prefers to these “slave types”: They are shrewd, cunning, assertive, as well as exploitative and aggressive. These “masters” never serve others. Each “master’s” goal is to fulfill self-centered desires, even if this goal causes real suffering and hardship for other people—perhaps especially if that causes pain. Other people’s needs and desires are important to a “master” only as a means to an end: his or her own fulfillment and power. Power, especially power over other people, is the primary value. According to Nietzsche, the “good” person is a “man of prey,” never a person who prays. He is crafty and egocentric.

Clearly, many “master” virtues are deeply embedded in our language and practice. When I talk to business groups and explain to them Nietzsche’s two value systems for the harmless types and the shrewd types, no one questions that such values are emphasized in our business, economic, and social system. To call Sharon a “shrewd business person,” for example, implies not only that she is brilliant, but that stepping on your interests may well give her a special thrill.

Nietzsche introduced his social and ethical thought as an extension of Darwin’s biological theory. Both through Nietzsche and through many other sources—many having nothing to do with Darwin’s biology—social Darwinism has so impregnated our expectations that we rarely even question the rewards of aggressive business practice. We blame the poor for their own misery. We are not surprised or offended when brilliant business strategy results in exploitation of others. As a society we expect those who have power—whether “brain power” or economic power—to use it in selfish ways. “Play our rough-and-tumble games or be considered harmless, ignorant, and wimpy,” the attitude seems to be.

The Refreshingly Alien Jesus

Thank God, the status-quo options for thinking, talking, and acting are not the only ones. Jesus leads in another direction; his actions, thoughts, perceptions, and expectations are refreshingly alien. How does Jesus address our “social Darwinism”? He attacks the issue at the climax of the instructions he gave when he first appointed and commissioned his disciples: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16, NIV).

The Jerusalem Bible translates the last phrase as “be cunning as serpents and yet as harmless as doves.”

To Jesus, the alternatives offered by both Nietzsche and our society clearly would be inadequate. You do not have to choose between being shrewd or harmless; you need not opt for either innocence or cunning. You should choose both.

But what do his words mean? Just how are we to be “as shrewd as snakes”? The word for shrewd in the original language had sharply negative connotations for Jesus’ audience. It implied abuse of ability or authority just as the words shrewd, cunning, and crafty do in our language and culture. When used in the Scriptures, shrewd describes people who are crafty in selfish and ungodly ways. (See Luke 16:1–10; Job 5:13, and Isa. 44:25.) The word Matthew uses for shrewd is, in fact, the same word that is used to describe the crafty snake in the Greek version of Genesis 3. (Have you ever heard a sermon on that subject?)

Jesus’ instructions demand a radical reorientation of our daily language, perceptions, behavior, and expectations. A follower of Jesus can no longer live placidly by such prejudices as “harmless people are not brilliant earth shakers,” or “shrewd people are not saintly,” or even “cunning people are not fair.”

In fact, if I understand Jesus at all, he is really saying that if you want to be harmless you must also be shrewd, and if you are really innocent you must also be cunning. This is very different from the old myths that say shrewd behavior will magically produce fair results in the long run, or that passive innocence is really prudent.

In contrast, Jesus claims that we need and must give specific attention to both shrewd and harmless ways. And, while Jesus contradicts the assumptions of our culture, his teaching fits surprisingly well—miraculously, one might say—with the facts and artifacts of our lives. In spite of our cultural prejudices and personal expectations, we discover that shrewd and harmless do woo and complement each other remarkably well.

When Opposites Attract

To show how well these can work together in practical situations, here are five vivid examples of the interdependence of shrewd and harmless virtues (the dominant virtue alternates in each case):

• When Mary Nelson came to West Garfield Park in Chicago a few years ago, Bethel Lutheran Church, where her brother was pastor, was about to fold. The area is one of the three poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. The infant mortality is worse than Haiti’s, violence and unemployment rates are astronomical, and there is no bank for its 40,000 people. This brilliant woman, with two Ph.D.’s, has helped organize the poor in cooperatives and small-business corporations, has confronted and altered banking and civic policy, and has nurtured an effective Christian-school system, a sweat-equity program, new city parks, and more. Her efforts have helped produce thousands of new jobs and generate $18 million of housing rehabilitation with “creative” financing (but virtually no government help). Most important, she has brought a sense of gospel hope in a terribly depressed area. Mary Nelson is so actively and effectively harmless in large measure because she is also shrewd.

• There are no successful “saintly” corporations if we employ our “wimpy” picture of sainthood, but there are aggressive businesses that have learned the value of concern for others. When Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman did an extensive study of the largest financially successful American companies (chronicled in In Search of Excellence), they found at least two threads running through the operations of these massive organizations: sincere concern for people and commitment to quality service. These themes of Peters and Waterman are strengthened in their more recent writings. Shrewdness requires harmlessness in order to succeed.

• In an effort to manage a corporation with a Christian framework, ServiceMaster devoted itself to four objectives. The first two, “to honor God in all we do” and “to help people develop,” emphasize active harmlessness, while the other two, “to pursue excellence” and “to grow profitably,” cultivate shrewdness. Obviously, without its standard of excellence and its incredible growth, ServiceMaster’s Christian “harmlessness” would have been severely limited.

• Twenty-one years ago a small group of young people organized a garbage-collecting company that now employs 38,000 people and has a gross income of $4 billion. Waste Management has become the largest waste-handling company in the world through a voracious acquisition of a record 3,000 other companies. How has it succeeded where others have floundered? A key feature of its success is a unique pairing of accountants and managers to “institutionalize” integrity, quality, and accountability. Waste Management’s internal checks and balances foster shrewd—and “innocent”—decisions by means of a rapid flow of accurate information. And, in order to keep ahead of its market, Waste Management has become the most advanced organization for recycling many of our resources, even creating markets to provide uses for otherwise useless waste material. Surely Waste Management stays shrewd in large measure by also fostering a kind of harmlessness within its organization, and for its customers and shareholders.

• Irene Johnson found that living in a public-housing project in Chicago was “the pits.” Instead of remaining powerless, she organized the 5,000 people at Le Claire Courts to clean and fix up their living space, to bring families together, to talk young women out of prostitution, to cut back on drug use, and to start taking pride in being human and being God’s children. Her “harmless” goals found precious little support outside of the housing project, so Johnson had to resort to shrewd action. After she persuaded some Le Claire women to stop being prostitutes, pimps brought in women from other parts of Chicago to make themselves available in front of Le Claire Courts on the very busy Cicero Avenue. Repeated calls to the police were unheeded—perhaps because the authorities do not understand how much the poor hate prostitution. Not one to give up easily, Johnson and several other women began patrolling Cicero Avenue late at night with baseball bats over their shoulders. Then the police came. Johnson and her friends “innocently” explained that they were on the way to the park to play baseball (at midnight?). This shrewd display of courage persuaded the police that these women were deadly serious. Genuine harmlessness also requires shrewd action.

We are all familiar with similar examples. Too often our language and our society fail to acknowledge the interdependence of these seeming opposites: shrewd and harmless behavior. In fact, people often assume, without much argument, the “incompatability of self-interest with moral demands.” (See, for example, Alan Goldman’s Moral Foundations of Professional Ethics.)

On Not Being Naïve

People frequently try to be shrewd without being harmless—but this is often disastrous. Exxon, for example, thought it could build an oil tanker without some basic safety features and “shrewdly” save a substantial amount of corporate money. Exxon also “shrewdly” avoided the legal complications of disciplining a pilot with a proven record of driving while intoxicated. The consequences show that both decisions were, in fact, neither shrewd nor harmless to the environment, to us at the gas pumps, nor to Exxon itself.

Also, far too frequently we try to be harmless without being shrewd. The results are often disastrous. As a classic example, President Jimmy Carter hoped to stage a significant nonviolent moral protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan: He cancelled our country’s wheat contract with the USSR. Unfortunately, he failed to consult with the experts on the economics of world food production and distribution. Relieved of their contractual obligations to us, the Soviets were able to get all the wheat they wanted cheaply, and the only people who suffered were American farmers and taxpayers.

Of course, we should not be naïve. Life is not nearly so simple as my comments might imply. There is not always a harmless choice to be made, and often we must choose the least of several evils. We do not always have the information, time, intelligence, and other resources to make shrewd decisions. For too many decisions in life—especially in the areas of economics and politics—the results will not be fair to everyone, no matter what we decide. Some people suffer or benefit more than others. It would be dishonest to sugar-coat these decisions by pretending that there are no hard choices.

Instead, as sinners in a sin-ravaged world, we ask God’s forgiveness for the evil choices we make, even when we have chosen the least of several evils. Moreover, honest participation in the rough-and-tumble, hard choices of this world could well enhance our taste for the fulfillment of the kingdom of God. The more realistically and sincerely we are involved in this life’s problems and decisions, the more candidly and fervently will we pray, “Thy kingdom come.”

But for now, we cannot retreat. There are no innocent bystanders—just innocent problem resolvers and guilty bystanders. If we are not immersed in the issues and decisions of our time, we are a significant part of the problem, and likely contributors to tragedies. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, the only thing necessary for evil to succeed is for good people to do nothing.

Virtues For The Long Haul

The shrewd and harmless virtues fit closely together especially in the long-term perspective. It is not our planning for next week or the efforts to sustain a profit for the next couple of quarters that cultivate harmlessness. We are easily blinded by immediate pressures. The ethical (that is, harmless and shrewd) vision is more effective in planning that considers the kind of world we are creating around us as well as the kinds of goods and services we can provide to remain profitable. Businesses exist to make a profit through providing goods and services for a variety of stake holders; in strategic planning, appropriate goods and services that enable profit are examined, evaluated, and justified.

That Americans do comparatively little strategic planning accounts for some of the suppression of ethical issues in business. On the other hand, our general clumsiness with ethics may well contribute to the halting quality of our strategic planning: If we do not know where we should be going, how can we begin to plan the route?

The other side of the coin reveals something as well: Long-term harmlessness will reject the seemingly “innocent” bystander role in the face of manipulative advertising, unsafe products, racial prejudice, dehumanizing poverty, and the destruction of God’s creation. This “strategic harmlessness” requires shrewd analysis of facts, patterns, and trends, then adjusts priorities and values so that needs will be met. No major corporation, for example, can ignore the consequences of rampant poverty in our cities and towns. As a result, some of the most active, effective, and intelligent programs to combat poverty are being proposed and pursued by corporate America.

This cultivation of shrewd harmlessness is therefore not just taught by Jesus. It is also the most central theme in the writings of the brilliant free-market economist Adam Smith. Contrary to the interpretations of Smith given by Milton Friedman and others, Adam Smith placed the concerns of justice (his word for harmlessness) before prudence (his word for shrewdness) in economic and business decisions. As much as he treasured liberty and resisted most attempts to regulate business or the economy, he insisted that whenever legislation is enacted that favors workers or the poor, that legislation is always “just and equitable.”

Smith himself proposed and defended legislation that would channel the results of shrewd, self-interested business decisions into benefits for the poor. The goal was to tame self-interest for justice. In other words, the synergism of self-interest and justice was for Smith an ongoing responsibility—not a given. Smith’s “invisible hand” that guides self-interest to serve justice has to do with the subtle structure of social and economic behavior—a structure for which we are at least partly responsible.

Smith was also realistic, however. He observed that legislation proposed and supported by business interests is almost always motivated by selfish efforts to protect or enhance privileged market positions. Such business legislation should be resisted because it is both unjust (harmful) and inefficient (unshrewd).

The harmless and shrewd virtues are certainly not the only ethical attitudes and approaches taught by Jesus, and they are not the only virtues needed for ethical marketplace activity today. But harmlessness and shrewdness are both immensely valuable—especially in the potent blend that Jesus himself so justly and effectively exemplified.

In much of the world, following Jesus still means being a candidate for martyrdom.

Take this test. True or false: (1) The bloody butchering of Christians stopped with Constantine. (2) Instruments of torture and death—thumbscrews, stakes, hanging ropes—are but relics of medieval intolerance. (3) Persecution of Christians has almost ended (except, perhaps, under Communist regimes).

If you answered true to any of the above, you’re wrong.

Hard figures are not easy to come by, but evidence is mounting that martyrdom is a painfully contemporary reality. In many countries, Christians pay a dear price for believing. Especially during Lent, when we recall Jesus’ prediction that he would “suffer many things … and be killed,” we do well to remember the persecuted. They have something vital to teach us about following Christ.

Consider these facts:

• In this century, an average of 300,000 Christians has been martyred each year, according to David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia. Some claim Barrett’s number includes Christians killed for reasons other than faith, but even allowing for differences in the definition and the difficulties of reporting, the figure is remarkable. When Barrett’s documentation is released over the next couple of years, the impact could be stunning. Martyrdom, Barrett wants to show, is not an “outrageous exception, but a part of a surprisingly regular 2,000-year pattern where persecution and suffering are the normal lot of the body of Christ.”

• Because of increasing terrorism, says Jim Reap-some, editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, “missionaries are finding themselves in increasingly dangerous conditions.” Many mission organizations have been training missionaries in contingency procedures for use in kidnapings or attacks. Reapsome believes that the history of the church confirms that missionaries are bona fide “candidates for martyrdom.”

The church needs to keep this panorama of suffering in view for two reasons.

First, martyrs and persecuted believers vividly remind us of God’s triumphal power in the midst of harrowing circ*mstances. Just as Abel “died, but through faith … is still speaking” (Heb. 11:4), the suffering church, ancient and modern, witnesses to certainties that run deeper than life itself.

When Anabaptists were sentenced to death in the sixteenth century, authorities tried to keep them from proclaiming to the townspeople the faith that led them to the stake. Sometimes local officials used “tongue screws”—gruesome instruments that bored through the tongue and immobilized the mouth with iron plates. But the martyrs’ witness could not be silenced. Their quiet testimony moved onlookers, as well as believers in centuries since. If modern martyred and persecuted believers like the late Chet Bitterman and Cuban exile Armando Valladares are not forgotten, they can likewise inspire faith and courage.

Second, we must support persecuted believers with prayer. Remembering believers submerged in a ditch of human excrement or shocked relentlessly with cattle prods may make praying less soothing, but weekly corporate prayer, as well as daily individual prayer, should embrace fellow believers living in hostile countries like Albania, Turkey, or China.

Thinking about the suffering church is not pleasant, but it can be a tonic for the complacency that ails us. If we determine not to forget our persecuted friends in the faith, their witness can again become a potent factor in the church’s faith and the gospel’s spread.

By Timothy K. Jones.

When the Christianity Today Institute panel on the power of the Holy Spirit (see p. 24) met in a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, all of us anticipated a battle royal. After all, the church has fought over the topic for three centuries, and never more energetically than in our own lifetime. And we deliberately chose the panel members to represent opposite sides on the most crucial issues.

There was no battle. Instead of the brash bull tipping over heirloom china that some had expected the leader of the signs-and-wonders movement to be, John Wimber proved to be a kindly, jovial grandfather, more eager to listen and learn than to argue. The burden of the traditional and logical Calvinist, Jim Packer, was to warn against an aloof deistic view of God and to stress that the God of the Bible is immediately and powerfully active in the world and in the believer’s soul. The neat but rigid categories of dispensationalist Charles Ryrie really don’t rule out supernatural miracles here and now.

In that atmosphere of surprise, long-held feelings of suspicion evaporated with amazing rapidity. And that was good.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing essentially bad about doctrinal disagreements or theological battles. Biblical Christianity is committed to the infinite importance of truth and to the moral necessity of persuasion and even confrontation.

But this was good. Not that we agreed on all points when we were finished, because we didn’t. We still disagreed. But now we disagreed over real differences and not over what we thought someone else was saying. Moreover, we realized the things we really do disagree about are not nearly so important to us as the things we thought we disagreed about.

New Attitudes

The result of that meeting is that I have a different attitude toward my brother than I did before, because now I am convinced that he is going in the right direction—although he may slip on the ice and run the danger of breaking his leg. To the best of my knowledge, no one on that panel left the session without a greater appreciation of the other panel members and a deep gratitude to God, who is using them in their own way—mistaken though they may be at some point—to further his divine kingdom in this desperately needy world.

Even more important than this, each of us saw that we do not need to beat the air feverishly, seeking to combat doctrines that our brothers in fact do not hold. Energies and resources for the kingdom can thus be saved and employed in useful causes that advance the kingdom of God and bring great good to the human race.

And best of all, perhaps, this is the biblical way and, in fact, the only way for each of us to find the truth we all need. Most theological battles have been waged from a distance. And while face-to-face discussions are not always helpful (remember Luther and Zwingli’s impasse at Marburg), they are biblical. Now that we see more clearly what each of us really does believe, we can assist each other to see where we are departing from the teaching of Scripture, where we are misapplying its truths, and where these truths can be more accurately and effectively applied to the world of human needs.

The “body” of Christ is terribly important, and each member has much to contribute to the other. Of course, we knew this before the panel met, but now we know it experientially and practically. The experience makes us eager for more.

By Kenneth S. Kantzer.

Homosexual practice is a sin. That is not a pretty statement. In fact, in an age of Jell-O it has the cutting sharpness of a razor blade. But we feel that this is the witness of Scripture, and we want to be a people formed by God’s Word.

Without Scripture, a stand against hom*osexual expression could be dismissed as hom*ophobic fear, or even oppression of a minority. And these are indeed the rallying cries of two Lutheran churches in San Francisco. On January 21, Saint Francis Lutheran Church and First United Lutheran Church ordained two lesbians and one gay man, despite warnings from denominational heads of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) that there would be disciplinary action.

Currently a team is seeking to reconcile the churches with the denomination’s bylaws, which forbid the ordination of practicing hom*osexuals. One possible outcome is the expulsion of the churches from the denomination. A complicating factor is that the denomination is far from settled on the issue. There is a study in progress that is reassessing the church’s position, although that study is not due until 1993.

Grace For All

We do not urge disciplinary action because of a desire to return to the Old Testament practices (such as stoning hom*osexuals). At the Cross of Jesus Christ, all sinners (that is, all human beings) are now to be the recipients of love, mercy, and forgiveness. The church’s mission is to embrace the hom*osexual, just as it embraces all who struggle and are lost.

Nevertheless, the message sinners hear must be true to its source. And despite contemporary exegetical gymnastics, the scriptural verses dealing specifically with hom*osexuality plus the positive revelation of one man-one wife as the biblical ideal for sexual relations make it clear that hom*osexual practices are inconsistent with the pursuit of righteousness.

Therefore, confronted with the choice between what seems right according to the culture and what seems right according to Scripture, we urge the ELCA to emulate its forebear by standing firmly on the side of God’s Word and proclaiming, “Here we stand. We can do no other.”

By Michael G. Maudlin.

Bible comes with breakfast on sunny South Padre Island, Texas’s hottest spring-break resort.

It does, that is, for the students who can’t find a seat at one of the two restaurants in town that offer a 99-cent breakfast. So instead, they head over to Island Baptist Church to gobble down pancakes, Spam, orange juice, and French toast—for free. By 9:30 A.M. one especially balmy spring morning in this coastal resort town, 250 college students have dropped by.

“I was just driving down the road and saw their sign, so I thought they wanted me,” said Southwest Texas State University student Tom Fawcette. That morning, he got to listen to the contemporary Christian rock group Petra wailing over the loudspeakers. He also was handed a card with the plan of salvation on one side and a hotline number on the other.

He is one of at least 100,000 students from colleges and universities in the Midwest, Texas, and Canada who descend on this five-mile-long island each March. The island’s eastern edge, only a few blocks wide, abruptly ends with a line of hotels that overlook the whitest beaches in Texas. The hotels, boarding houses, and cottages, along with a glitzy mall constructed with tourists in mind, make the beach a popular destination amid south Texas’s drab terrain. In recent years, South Padre has rivaled Fort Lauderdale and Daytona Beach in Florida for fun, sun, and sin.

Waiting for the student hordes with open arms is Island Baptist. Each spring break, many of its 107 members, along with volunteers from around the state, put together one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s more offbeat outreaches. This particular morning, a contingent from the Texas Baptist Men disaster unit (no joke) was flipping pancakes at the grill. Helping out were students from Baptist Student Union (BSU) groups around the state. Last spring, 150 came. Their rewards were suntans and little sleep.

“A girl called us last night,” said Buddy Young, a BSU director at West Texas State University, “because a guy had passed out in her room and started throwing up. She didn’t even know who he was. His friends had gotten him drunk and left him there. We sobered him up, and we’ll be going back this afternoon to talk to him some more.”

The “we” includes BSU students involved in the church’s van service for spring-break students. Island Baptist prints up about 75,000 manila hotline cards to be distributed on the island. Even local bartenders give them out to students too drunk to walk back to their hotels.

Anyone can call the hotline, day or night, and be put in touch with an operator who will pass on the call for for a ride to one of five vans equipped with CB radios. These vans roam the town and pick up students too drunk to make it back safely to their hotels on their own. Before they leave the van, passengers will hear the gospel presented by two Baptist students stationed in the van for that purpose.

Reaction varies, but sometimes riders tell their compadres to shut up so they can listen. Church members estimate they picked up almost 8,000 during spring break last year.

“That’s their most important service, in my mind,” said Geri Wilson, communications manager for the South Padre Island Visitor and Convention Bureau. “They’re really helping people.”

No-Holds-Barred Evangelism

The Southern Baptists may be helping more people than they know, given the nature of the intoxicated college student. One of the country’s grisliest murders occurred less than an hour’s drive from South Padre last year when a group of bored “spring breakers” left the island on March 13 and drove across the border to the Mexican city of Matamoros. That night, a 21-year-old University of Texas premed student disappeared to become the fourteenth victim of an occult group. The discovery of Mark Kilroy’s body days later created headlines around the country.

Spring-break ministry is therefore more significant and serious than it might seem, says Island Baptist’s 29-year-old pastor, Charlie Arnold.

“Beach ministry just isn’t given much attention,” Arnold believes. “We talk about urban evangelism, downtown ministry, border ministry, and so on. But resort areas offer some significant advantages in ministering to people,” says this minister sporting a “Padre for Jesus” T-shirt, whose boyish face and wind-tossed brown hair make him look more puckish than preachy.

One of these advantages has to do with the leisure time and built-in boredom factor that hits “spring breakers” on about the fourth day. Then the students start wandering down to Matamoros—and the Southern Baptists start applying Arnold’s no-holds-barred evangelistic methods.

His Baptist student volunteers hang out at concerts and start up conversations in Port-a-Potti lines, elevators, and in hotel hot tubs. The last method was pioneered by a wheelchair-bound man who wanted to witness. His friends moved him from one hot tub to another in the luxury beach hotels, where he witnessed to his heart’s content.

No Locale Too Remote

Arnold’s “army” also crashes private parties. “We’ve had the parties’ hosts turn the music off and ask everyone to sit down and listen to what we were saying about Christ,” Arnold said. “And people got saved. We’ve had people pray in the middle of nightclub dance floors. People are searching for something. There’s something about the dynamics of a resort area that make people willing to talk to each other.”

Arnold takes that view so seriously he is studying resort evangelism at Luther Rice Seminary in Jacksonville, Florida. No locale is too remote for his evangelists. If crowds of students are floating out in the surf waiting for waves, Arnold sends Baptist surfers out to talk with them.

The action is even faster on the beach, where the Baptists staff “burnt-aid stations” and offer free water and aloe for red skins. An estimated 700 students a day patronize them, stepping around beer cans, p*rnographic sand drawings, fraternity flags, and boom boxes to get there.

That is no small task. Spring break on the beach looks like a cross between a massive “frat” party and Sodom and Gomorrah. Both sexes model avant-garde swimsuits, guzzle beer, and listen to the rantings of a local disc jockey broadcast at ear-splitting levels. Even students sitting a football-field length from the speakers have a hard time hearing each other.

“Some people have been praying with us [to accept Christ], and others have decided to wait,” said one BSU student who was dispensing aloe. “I think they’re more willing to tell us about God than we are to tell them. Almost no one has turned us down for conversation. They ask us about premarital sex and drinking.”

At the end of each week, Arnold stages a baptism at the most crowded part of the beach. By this time, jaded “spring breakers” are willing to hear something different. Each time a new convert arises, dripping, from the waves, the crowd lets out a cheer.

Five were baptized during spring break 1989 and another five students were converted after they asked what was happening. The church recorded 285 conversions that week. In 1988, when Arnold had more student helpers, 313 students committed their lives to the Lord—and that doesn’t include the conversions logged by workers from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and other Christian groups roaming the beaches.

Island Baptist sends the names of new Christians to the Southern Baptist church nearest their campus and to a local BSU representative. Arnold has three files of letters from grateful “spring breakers” who became Christians at South Padre. Those letters keep him going while he waits for his dreams of year-round evangelism to the island’s 1.2 million visitors to come true. They keep him going during weeks of unceasing work and little sleep. They keep him going with memories of students who came looking for enjoyment, found emptiness, encountered Christ, and left knowing him for eternity.

By Julia Duin, religion writer for the Houston Chronicle, and author of Purity Makes the Heart Grow Stronger (Servant).