Page 4665 – Christianity Today (2024)

Programming changed, too. In 1981 the network, which had always broadcast a high percentage of “family-oriented” material, eliminated all weekly religious broadcasts except the 700 Club. Reruns of popular shows such as Gunsmoke took their place. By 1982, CBN had enough advertising revenues to make a profit. By 1987, it could begin charging cable networks for its broadcasts. Eventually, the cable operation made so much money it endangered the tax-exempt status of CBN and was spun off as International Family Entertainment, a separate corporation, which owns the Family Channel with a contractual commitment to broadcast the 700 Club daily. (In the process of this transition, Robertson personally made millions of dollars, much of which he has donated to his various ministries.)

The secularization of programming dismayed many Robertson followers. In reality, it reflected Robertson’s original concern for reaching the irreligious. Several published critiques had severely questioned the audience claims of religious television. CBN took them seriously. “What impact are we really making in response to the Great Commission?” was the question raised, according to Michael Little. They were ready for radical change in order to reach the lost.

It’s a great story, how Robertson took a defunct TV station and by faith created the thing we call “religious television.” It’s also a retelling, with different technology, of the story told again and again in evangelical history. In the 1820s, Charles Finney rewrote the rules of revivals, with extraordinary results. Billy Sunday, D. L. Moody, Billy Graham did the same in their own ways. Still, you are left with a nagging doubt: What does it amount to? Certainly it comes to less than Robertson dreamed in the beginning.

“Frankly, only a masoch*st would want to watch religious shows all day long,” Robertson told CHRISTIANITY TODAY last year. To attract wider audiences, CBN produced soap operas, game shows, and tried to start a worldwide news network. But costs were high, and none of the shows proved sustainable. The television market, Little emphasizes, has fractionalized into niche markets, and it is very difficult to gain enough advertising revenue to pay for original programming.

The 700 Club is now almost the only regular program CBN produces for the United States. Its ratings are down. Income from cash donations has plateaued at just over $100 million. (High-water mark was in 1987, when cbn took in gifts of $135 million.) The show is well made, it covers a wide variety of topics, it is not relegated to believers-only times and channels, but it nonetheless serves a religious niche market. Consequently, the evangelistic focus of CBN has turned overseas, where Robertson hopes to see 500 million conversions before the year 2000.

“In the last couple of years I’m shifting emphasis,” Robertson told me. “I don’t think America is going to have a revival. I just don’t see us turning away from the wholesale slaughter of young people, of unborn babies, some of the bizarre sex of the motion pictures;

I don’t think we’re going to see it. I think there’ll be revival in church, but I think that we’re going to see essentially two cultures.”

Robertson described some hopeful signs among American Christians, but when I asked him to compare these with his experiences as a seminarian in New York, he said, “I don’t see the desperation. Frankly, the church has too much today. We’re just too comfortable. The concept of staying at ease in Babylon is very real, and all of us have become extremely materialistic. We are so wealthy, our nation is so wealthy, and the churches are so wealthy. It’s very hard in the midst of that just to say, ‘God, we’re desperate.’ “

Robertson has prospered as much as anyone, of course. He lives in a spacious, gated compound of the CBN campus, with plenty of room for his horses. He walks to his work via a private tunnel. Millions of dollars are at his disposal, and he wields great influence in Washington.

In the meantime, CBN counts millions of conversions that have come through its broadcasts. (The day I interviewed him, Robertson estimated they would hear from 1,200 people who had prayed for salvation that day as a result of watching the 700 Club.) Christian programs, once a Sunday-morning-only phenomenon, can be located on most cable systems at almost any time, and millions find in them daily hope and inspiration. In untold ways, churches have been influenced by programs like the 700 Club–in their style of worship and in their sense of ecumenical unity with Christians they see on TV. Such achievements are not to be sneezed at, even though they fall far short of the dreams of those prayerful New York seminarians who said, “Without revival, there’s nothing. There’s no hope.”

Robertson brought evangelicals back into the mainstream as a potent political force. Robertson grew up in a highly political family, but all political ambitions disappeared when he was converted. To a newborn evangelical Christian, politics seemed to lack spiritual value. When his father faced a tough reelection campaign, Robertson felt he could have swung support to him, but “the Lord refused to give me liberty. ‘I have called you to my ministry,’ he spoke to my heart. ‘You cannot tie my eternal purposes to the success of any political candidate . . . not even your own father.’ ” His father lost.

Like many Christians, Robertson was deeply concerned by the moral decline of the United States. Only gradually, however, did he come to think of it in political terms. The Supreme Court played a major role in this swing, first in its school prayer decisions, and then, most dramatically, in the Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Jerry Falwell led fundamentalists into re-engagement through the Moral Majority. Robertson was supportive though never fully identified.

As Robertson tells it, Jimmy Carter’s election pushed him into full-scale commitment. At first he was enthusiastic that an openly Christian politician might be President. He even played a minor behind-the-scenes role in helping Carter win the Pennsylvania primary. He was appalled, however, by the officials President Carter brought into office with him.

Robertson began to build his own politically motivated organizations. A 1980 rally, Washington for Jesus, attracted 500,000 marchers (by the organizers’ count) and provided a vision of political and religious unity. Robertson worked closely with evangelicals, most notably Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ. Nevertheless, a run for President seemed unlikely. John Gimenez, who had first envisioned Washington for Jesus, remembers prophesying on the 700 Club that Robertson would someday run for President. “Brother, that’s a demotion, not a promotion,” Robertson replied.

Pat Robertson has lived an improbable life, yet nothing he ever did seemed less likely than his run for President in 1988. No one professionally involved with religion–no priest or minister–had ever before been a serious candidate for the presidency. Hardly any reputable political pundit considered Robertson a presidential possibility. Yet for a fleeting moment in the primary season–he won the Michigan straw poll and placed second in the Iowa caucus–he seemed to have an honest chance.

Within weeks he was out of the race. The reasons candidates fail to attract support are complex, but Robertson couldn’t quiet doubts about electing a candidate with such a strong religious vision, and (related to it) the concern that he was a nut. Those concerns continue today as Republicans debate the role of the Religious Right.

“Robertson’s candidacy threatens the pluralism that is critical to holding our society together,” wrote Elizabeth Drew in the “New Yorker” during the 1988 primaries. Presumably she had in mind the common idea that politics and religion should not mix, that Robertson had faith convictions far too strong to allow him to be President for all the varied people of America.

The “nut” charge probably worried voters more. Most Americans don’t trust, for President, a man who hears God’s voice telling him what to do. A lot was made of Robertson’s belief that prayer had caused Hurricane Gloria to swerve away from Virginia Beach. (Instead, noted Christopher Buckley in the “New York Times Book Review,” it destroyed Calvin Klein’s summer home on Fire Island.)

His run was superficially a failure. The 700 Club suffered dramatic losses in income and audience during his long absence. Large staff layoffs resulted. Yet today at CBN the common assessment of his candidacy is upbeat. Robertson emerged from the battle with a long list of supporters and a strong sense of the need for grassroots organizing. He hired young Ralph Reed to run the Christian Coalition and soon it grew into a national political force. “Now we are a force to be reckoned with,” says Vinson Synan. “No one runs for President without taking evangelicals into account. Robertson brought that about more than any other person.”

But, one might ask again, so what? The legal status of abortion remains unchanged, TV and movies are as bad as or worse than ever, public schools are not markedly more conducive to faith. Re-engaging conservative Christians in the political process is an enormous accomplishment. Whether those Christians can change the direction of society, however, remains to be seen. As with the charismatic movement, as with Christian TV, Robertson’s political legacy remains ambivalent.

In 1607, Pat Robertson likes to point out, the first permanent English settlers in America landed at Cape Henry, now part of Virginia Beach, and erected a seven-foot cross. There they knelt and, according to Robertson in his book “The New Millennium,” “claimed this new nation for the glory of God and His Son Jesus Christ. In God’s eyes the United States of America did not begin on July 4, 1776, but on April 29, 1607.”

Robertson is intrigued by the fact that his ministry has grown near the site of that prayer, and that in the year 2007 “by some amazing coincidence–or might we not say foresight of God–the 400th anniversary of the greatest Gentile power that the world has ever known coincides precisely with the 40th year conclusion of the generation of the ‘end of the Gentile power’ “–that is, Israel’s capture of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. In The New Millennium, Robertson adds that “this observer of events will have turned exactly 77 years old” in that same year.

Robertson is coy as to exactly what to make of such coincidences, but he hints broadly that these dates might be associated with the end times. “Might it be” (a phrase Robertson often uses in end-times speculation) that he and his ministry will have an important role to play?

“Possibility thinking” enabled Robertson to launch innovative organizations and to run for President. Yet it is also this mental fertility that raises doubts about his intentions. If the real United States began in 1607 with a prayer, then is the “real” U.S. a theocentric nation? Should its laws be taken from the Bible? Are non-Christians qualified to hold office? These are a few of the suspicious questions posed to Robertson, and while he is capable of giving nuanced and thoughtful answers, he has written and spoken without such nuances often enough to make people doubt just what is truly in his mind.

The fear that Robertson’s goal is a theocratic, for-Christians-only America is misplaced, I am quite sure. (He has written sloppily enough about a Christian America to allow such a fear to be credible.) Robertson, no systematic thinker, doesn’t seem to have any really clear picture of what should and should not be Christian about America. His friend Bob Slosser has it about right: “He was probably more concerned for what he didn’t want America to look like than what he did want it to look like.” It was the evils of drugs and promiscuity and disrespect for God that moved Pat Robertson to political engagement, not a worked-out political philosophy.

Certainly he has a weakness for apocalyptic speculation. His recent novel “The End of the Age” is only the latest of many Robertson flirtations with end-times scenarios. In it the final battle between good and evil is launched after a prophecy-fulfilling meteor lands in the Pacific Ocean and destroys California.

He also has a weakness for conspiracy theories. Writer Michael Lind caused quite a flap when he reviewed Robertson’s 1991 book “The New World Order,” drawing attention to its sources in paranoid anti-Semitic literature. Robertson was highly indignant, and certainly all evidence suggests that he is anything but anti-Semitic. (Some of the sources Robertson drew on do appear to be at least covertly so.) The deeper problem is that some of the “could-be” conspiracies that Robertson flirts with are downright weird. Perhaps it is not unusual that Robertson mistrusts the Ford Foundation, the Federal Reserve, and the Council on Foreign Relations, to name just three of his betes noires. But he goes considerably further.

“Indeed, it may well be that men of goodwill like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush, who sincerely want a larger community of nations living at peace in our world, are in reality unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.” He traces this “tightly knit cabal” back to the eighteenth-century Illuminati and writes, “I am equally convinced that for the past two hundred years the term new world order has been the code phrase of those who desired to destroy the Christian faith and . . . replace it with an occult-inspired world socialist dictatorship.”

This is strange stuff, and there is a great deal more of it in “The New World Order.” (It surfaces much less often in his other books, although, for example, in “The New Millennium” Robertson asserts that the Vietnam War was lost by the United States through a “deliberate, calculated plan . . . put in place by those holding the ultimate power in our society, and fully supported by a leftist press.” That plan was the Cold War, a stalemate engineered so that “roughly 10 percent of our output could be wasted each year” to accomplish full employment.) Hurricane Gloria was not the half of Robertson’s problem in making himself out to be a mainstream thinker. And the fact that hundreds of thousands of supporters who read his books found in them nothing worrisome suggests one reason why evangelicals have had limited success thus far in American politics. Many evangelicals hold ideas that their neighbors find strange, and evangelicals don’t scrutinize their leaders in the way that Americans do presidential candidates.

Robertson is an important figure in himself, but he is important for another reason. It’s positively eerie how Pat Robertson makes a shadow picture of evangelicalism, duplicating and enlarging its strengths and weaknesses. Entrepreneurial, energetic, media savvy, he is a key religious leader for our times. Yet he (and evangelicalism, which is similarly potent) does not get much respect. He is intelligent and well educated, but he holds some strange ideas. He has written half a dozen bestsellers, yet not one rewards rereading. There is real passion for God and a willingness to thrive on the unpredictable, the affective, the supernatural. Like evangelicalism, he has all but bypassed the establishment, appealing to the common man and building new institutions from scratch. Evangelicalism shares his passion and his pragmatism. Yet his greatest successes (and evangelicalism’s) come overseas in nations where people are desperately poor. In his own wealthy nation, with its great Christian heritage, he is relegated to a broadcast ghetto he can’t break out of. So, to some extent, is evangelicalism, which thrives in Houston but can’t get to first base in Manhattan or Hollywood.

Like evangelicalism, Robertson at first gave up his political heritage because it was not sufficiently “spiritual.” America’s moral decay brought him back, just as it brought back (with Robertson’s help) much of the evangelical movement. Yet Robertson could not get elected, and the Religious Right has made little progress toward its goals.

That is why it is so hard to put him on the list of major religious figures of the twentieth century. For sheer vitality, he belongs. But will anyone remember him 20 years from now? Will he leave anything behind that matters?

Maybe. Robertson’s visible accomplishments are remarkable. I have hardly mentioned organizations he started, like Operation Blessing, which dispenses emergency help to the poor, or Regent University, which offers accredited graduate programs in communications and the arts (including journalism and film), business, counseling, divinity, education, government, and law. (These reflect Robertson’s own varied interests.) Through his television ministries, Robertson has seen millions of conversions, and today, in overseas venues, he is seeing a far greater harvest than ever before. (“Our organization, CBN, over thirty years of ministry had about 2 million people that came to the Lord. In the last five years we’ve had 52 million decisions in Russia, Romania, the Philippines, Latin America. . . .”) His public-interest law firm, the American Center for Law and Justice, has won important religious-liberties cases before the Supreme Court. Robertson is a respected senior figure among charismatics and Pentecostals, often asked to address large gatherings of pastors in the Third World. He almost singlehandedly built one of the larger television cable networks in the world and has invented and maintained a popular daily television program for 35 years. (“I’ve outlasted Johnny Carson.”) He created one of the most powerful grassroots political organizations in America, playing a major role in drawing conservative Christians back into political involvement.

That’s a lot. Maybe he has “stopped the bulldozer” (as he puts it) of liberalism, limiting its destruction of values Robertson holds precious. Certainly he has carved out a niche in public life (and in broadcasting) that earns grudging respect. That, however, was not his original hope. He wanted to transform America. Robertson is too evangelical and too charismatic to be satisfied with a stalemate. His lifelong driving passion is for revival. (And politics is part of that. He wants moral reformation and knows that the righteousness of a people is a political subject.)

As his friends said long ago, he might still say today: “Without revival, there’s nothing. There’s no hope.”

Like all evangelicals, Robertson is stuck between the hope of full redemption and the need to do something hopeful in an intractable world. Sometimes, maybe often, his own mixture of strengths and weaknesses helps keep him stuck there.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Many people dislike Pat Robertson–so much so that they miss his significance. Few would list him with "major religious figures of the twentieth century"–people like Karl Barth, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, and Billy Graham. But he belongs on that list. As much as anybody, he has put his stamp on American Christianity as it approaches the third millennium.

Just to get the negatives on the table, let's acknowledge the Geraldo factor. Robertson has spent 35 years in front of television cameras. He is a talk-show host, prone to colorful, shoot-from-the-hip glibness. Let's also acknowledge the Jim Bakker factor: he is a religious talk-show host, which gives many secularists (and some religious people) the shivers. Like much TV religion, Robertson's 700 Club offers populist, Pentecostal faith. He receives, on the air, with eyes clenched shut, messages from the Lord that someone's respiratory illness is being healed. He asks for money; and he is not just raising money to help the sick and needy around the world, he is trying to fund a flying hospital.

Robertson is also extremely conservative politically. He lobs shells against gay rights and abortion; he backed the contras in Nicaragua and the white government in South Africa; he fought to get Jesse Helms reelected. He even made friends and business deals with Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Such conservatism has its enemies, and besides, many Americans remain extremely uncomfortable mixing politics and faith.

Yet you don't have to be popular to be important. Robertson has shaped three major religious developments: the charismatic renewal, Christian tv, and evangelical politics. The charismatic renewal, of which Robertson is a founding member, modernized and broadened Pentecostalism, giving evangelicalism a renewed vitality. Robertson played a leading role in developing religious television, which has deeply (some would say insidiously) affected the church. Most recently, Robertson has led evangelical Christians into political re-engagement. Together, these developments helped transform evangelicalism from a small, defended backwater to the leading force in American Christianity.

All of these developments remain ambivalent, unsettled, and unsettling. That is all the more reason why attention should be paid. To study Robertson is to think concretely about popular religion in America today. To an uncanny degree, Robertson mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of modern evangelicalism.

Robertson is a founding figure in the charismatic renewal, which invigorated and popularized modern evangelicalism. You cannot comprehend Robertson, or modern American Christianity, without taking into account the charismatic movement. It shaped Pat Robertson, and Robertson shaped it.

As a young man, Pat Robertson seemed an unlikely candidate for the renewal's fervent piety. He was well-educated (Phi Beta Kappa at Washington and Lee, Yale Law), sophisticated (his father was a U.S. senator), and a middle-of-the-road church member (raised a Baptist). By his own account, Robertson grew up resisting his mother's deep faith and living the kind of semi-dissolute life that U.S. senators' sons are sometimes reputed to enjoy.

A tour of duty in the United States Marine Corps failed to settle him down. He went to law school but lost interest; married a Catholic nurse named Dede shortly before she gave birth to their son Tim; failed the bar exam; and then entered business in New York. He experienced such restlessness he decided to quit and become a minister. His mother, told of his decision, said he didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about and arranged a meeting with a mystical Dutch evangelist, Cornelius Vanderbreggen. Through Vanderbreggen Robertson was joyfully converted to Christianity. He went home to his startled wife and poured their entire liquor supply down the drain.

Soon she was more than startled: he left her seven months pregnant with a second child, going off to a month-long InterVarsity conference where he would pray and study the Bible. A note came from Dede: "Please come back. I need you desperately." After consulting his Bible he replied, "I can't leave. God will take care of you."

Some years later he would receive a strong mental impression that God wanted him to consider Luke 12:33. Looking it up, he discovered Jesus' instructions to sell all and give to the poor. Dede came home to find all the furniture gone and the family sharing a friend's house in a Brooklyn slum.

In Robertson's fascinating autobiography, "Shout It from the Housetops," such extremes come across not as rigidity but as an absolutely impassioned search for intimacy with God. At his conversion, all other ambitions went out the window. Attending Biblical Seminary in New York City, Robertson became part of a small, devoted prayer group convinced that ordinary church life was utterly unsatisfactory, that they must experience the miraculous presence of God. They had few guides; they seem to have had only glancing contact with Pentecostalism, then mainly a lower-class phenomenon. Week-long fasts and all-night prayer meetings became common.

"We just wanted God . . . with great hunger and desperation," Robertson remembers. "Frankly, I've never since seen as many people who were that dedicated to seeking a walk with the Lord."

They sought more than personal illumination; they wanted revival. When Billy Graham came to Manhattan in 1957, they handed out tracts and preached on street corners, hungering for the movement of the Holy Spirit that would transform New York. "I'm sure if we prayed that hard in the South, the whole South would have burst into flame," Robertson says, remembering the city's resistance. Hearing a report of revival in the Hebrides Islands, one of their members spoke for them all: "Without revival, there's nothing. There's no hope."

A Korean woman in their group said that praying in tongues was the key to revival. One by one they experienced this gift, finding extraordinary satisfaction and excitement. Robertson was among a group of three who described their experience to Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale, who related it to a "Guideposts" writer named John Sherrill. Sherrill investigated and ended up composing two books on the phenomenon, "They Speak with Other Tongues" and "The Cross and the Switchblade," which he ghostwrote for David Wilkerson. Both would have enormous impact in spreading the burgeoning charismatic renewal.

So, in a different way, would Robertson. Over a long, difficult summer after seminary graduation, he turned down several pastorates, applied to be a missionary in Israel, and considered staying in the Bedford Stuyvesant slums. Then he was told of a defunct television station in Portsmouth, Virginia. Robertson heard the Lord telling him to buy it for $37,000. He hardly had $37, and he knew nothing about television. On his first visit to the wrecked facility he had to climb in a broken window, tiptoe through shattered glass and smashed vacuum tubes, and scare off a large wharf rat. He managed to buy the station on a promise to pay, and in 1961 began to broadcast three hours of Christian television each night. From the start, he thought big, calling his single, shoestring station the Christian Broadcasting Network. Though the station's signal barely reached the city limits, Robertson dreamed of a network of stations up and down the east coast.

He had the only Christian television station in the world, with one black-and-white camera that, remembers Pentecostal historian Vinson Synan, "panned around the studio and made you dizzy. They were the laughingstock of Portsmouth." Trying to fill the hours of programming, Robertson featured anyone who could "walk and talk and stay saved," as current 700 Club cohost Ben Kinchlow puts it. Leftover time was filled with free travelogues.

Production was so haphazard that, as one early staffer put it, "We should be showing what goes on off camera rather than what's on the set–it's a lot more interesting." There was never enough money, especially as Robertson was continually inspired to buy new equipment, expand facilities, and take on employees. The staff were frequently in turmoil. Robertson wrote that he was sometimes so exhausted his television audience thought he was drugged.

Yet the business had the feeling–to Robertson, anyway–of miracle. Local ministers kept their distance; still, the station found an audience. Robertson's enthusiasm, his expectation and proclamation of every kind of miracle, his divine guidance and "practice of the presence of God"–in short, his barely restrained Pentecostalism–drew a small but enthusiastic following. Soon every growing charismatic ministry used WYAH (yes, he named it after God) as a platform.

The audience grew larger as Robertson, ever an entrepreneur, mastered changing broadcast technology and developed a programming style to fit the medium. In 1965 Jim and Tammy Bakker, young Assemblies of God evangelists, joined him. Their unabashed emotionalism helped the show. In one key telethon, Jim Bakker wept on camera after failing to meet financial goals, and money poured in.

More important was the spontaneous, interactive style of broadcasting that developed out of the station's fundraising telethons. These became on-the-air revival meetings, with ongoing reports of miracles (and pledges) phoned in. Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman had broadcast Pentecostal crusades, but Robertson's shows had a different flavor: men and women who sat in living-room chairs and talked in conversational tones about their encounters with the supernatural.

Michael Little, now president of CBN, notes, "When you do that year after year, 260 shows a year throughout the seventies and throughout the eighties, and you have audiences of 7 million people a month, that normalizes what might have been considered a fringe experience."

"TV has been key to the charismatic movement's spread since WWII," argues historian Synan. Undoubtedly, the 700 Club (it got its name from an early telethon appeal for 700 donors who would give $10 a month) helped make the charismatic renewal familiar to millions of Americans. It became an accepted part of evangelicalism–a renewing element rather than a frightening and divisive force.

At the same time, the 700 Club nudged Pentecostalism into a wider world. Historian David Harrell says that Robertson was interested in "broadcasting rather than narrowcasting. He made a quite conscious effort in the ministry to permeate society."

Pentecostalism can tend toward ever- increasing displays of holy fervor for an ever-narrowing audience. Robertson's determination to reach a wide audience pushed the opposite direction. So did his own education and background. He invited a wider variety of guests and eventually increased the breadth of subject matter to include what would have been almost unthinkably profane in the beginning–politics.

Robertson steered the charismatic renewal toward unity with traditional evangelicals. I asked Harrell, who has written biographical studies of Oral Roberts and of Robertson, whether he thought Robertson had grown less charismatic over the years. "What always surprises me," he said, "is how strongly the distinctive charismatic flavor is still there. From a political perspective, I always thought Robertson would cut off some of the sharper edges of the miraculous. He has never done that. It is still out front."

Yet he has decisively steered the movement toward a broader Christian identity. During the mid-1970s, "shepherding" became the hottest trend in the charismatic renewal. It was an attempt to impose disciplined standards on the sometimes shallow enthusiasm that marked the movement. Promoted by a number of Christian leaders in the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, area, "shepherding" imposed a strict hierarchy on all members, with everyone subject to a "shepherd." Before long, "shepherds" dictated friendships, personal spending, even marriage plans. Robertson reacted violently. His long-time friend Bob Slosser, now a professor of journalism at Regent University, remembers Robertson coming back from an unfruitful confrontation. "He said, if that's what is known as the charismatic movement, I don't want to be identified with it."

Robertson banned anyone associated with shepherding from appearing on the 700 Club, a powerful blow at that time. At the same time, he began referring to himself as a "Spirit-filled evangelical" rather than a charismatic. "We wanted the soundness of the evangelical movement, scripturally and theologically," Slosser says.

Today, Robertson and his staff at the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) stiffen when the term charismatic is used. Robertson stresses that Regent University, the graduate school he founded in 1978, is an evangelical, not a charismatic, institution. It is not just a semantic stipulation. The leaders Robertson has hired to run his numerous organizations are a religiously varied lot, who do not all share his charismatic theology.

Robertson has also opened himself to Roman Catholics–so much so that he signed a controversial statement of common cause between evangelical and Catholic believers, hired a devout Roman Catholic to head his public-interest law organization (the ACLJ), and allows the Catholic Mass to be celebrated daily on the Regent campus for its sizable group of Roman Catholic students.

Robertson defines a broader, wider form of Pentecostalism that blurs almost imperceptibly into evangelicalism. Of course, some regret this as a loss. "I feel with all my heart that Pat is going to return to the simplicity of walking in the impossible," says John Gimenez, a Virginia Beach pastor who has known Robertson for many years.

Apparently Robertson feels some ambivalence, too. The week of September 24, 1995, he sponsored Seven Days Ablaze, an old-fashioned tent revival on the lawn in front of CBN headquarters. It featured some of the hottest (and most extreme) of Pentecostal preachers, such as Benny Hinn, Mario Murillo, T. L. Osborn, and T. D. Jakes. Many Pentecostals were delighted, thinking that Robertson had reawakened his zeal. Non-Pentecostals were dismayed. Vinson Synan says the atmosphere was like Oral Roberts meetings from the 1940s, such that a preacher could read from a telephone book and people would shout.

Why didn't Robertson balance his invitations? Michael Little says there was no strategic plan. He did say, however, that they felt they needed preachers who could do well in a tent. Pentecostals were the only evangelists who came to mind.

It is surely one of Pentecostalism's strengths that it remains comfortable in a tent. Synan commented that Robertson's huge potential audience around the globe, that of Asia and South America and Africa, understands a tent revival, finding no barriers in Pentecostal ecstasy.

Robertson has helped to shape the charismatic movement as a wide, ecumenical, and comfortable phenomenon; as such he has helped pull Pentecostalism closer to the mainstream of American life. Still, the movement contains a wilder strain, which gives it much of its attractive power but is almost inherently disturbing to middle-class expectations. In Robertson and in his work you still find that ambivalence. The huge tent that housed Seven Days Ablaze continues to stand at the Virginia Beach campus, next door to a first-class luxury hotel, and across a swath of grass from the large satellite uplinks of cbn.

Robertson's longing for revival led him to a series of broadcast innovations that created religious TV as we know it. The 380-acre Virginia Beach campus housing CBN and other Robertson enterprises is a spacious, manicured park cut out of piney forests. An Esquire magazine hit piece described it as "across from a strip mall," which is true but conveys an utterly inaccurate image. The strip mall is in the middle distance. These colonial Virginia brick buildings speak of tradition and elegance, as do the scores of fine Persian carpets that grace their floors. Future generations of Regent University students will be led to think of Robertson as a sober elder statesman rather than the daredevil entrepreneur he is in fact.

Most of Robertson's television innovations can be traced to that early, charismatic longing for revival. He cared, that is, about transforming large numbers of people, and was never happy operating in a religious ghetto. From the beginning, Robertson had an ambitious vision. He acquired several radio stations and even purchased a TV station in Bogota, Colombia.

Growth by acquisition proved too slow, however. In the early seventies, Robertson began to buy TV time on commercial stations across the country and to build local franchises to provide telephone counseling and other followup. So long as donations came in, he learned he could multiply potential viewers at a meteoric clip.

The logistics of shipping bulky video-tape from one station to the next was troublesome, though, handling local telephone responses was tricky, and buying air time expensive. Robertson looked for a better way and discovered it in satellite technology. In 1977 he became one of the very first (only Ted Turner and HBO were ahead of him) to invest massively. That year he broadcast his annual telethon simultaneously in 18 cities and launched a 24-hour cable network. Audiences were small in the beginning–according to David Harrell, CBN reached 1.5 million homes by cable in 1978-but would mushroom to almost 9 million homes ten years later.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The impulse to transform terror, to resist its tide with language or music or love, flows from a perception that all history is caught up in meaning greater than a single event can reveal and that has been showing itself through the ages, an act of faith Langer cannot allow himself in the dark aftermath of the death camps. His views are not particularly Jewish, nor mine peculiarly Christian. We have made different choices of belief, each available within the other’s orthodoxy: the one to see certain events as beyond the scope of divine intention and therefore solely of human doing (secularism), the other to see all history as informed by the freedom of human choice but ultimately subject to God (theodicy), lifting the death of martyrs from the sheer helplessness of victimhood to a purposed gain.

“Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” writes the psalmist (116:15). “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord” (Rev. 14:13). Though tortured or persecuted or stricken, the lives of his children are never wasted in God’s sight. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address, “Men Have Forgotten God,” we hear from the man who exposed the 60 million dead under Stalin to an incredulous world in language devoid of empty solace or evasion. He said, “The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.”

The flaw of sensibility that lacks divine dimension is to see only oppressors and victims. Such a view refuses to acknowledge the moral force of the individual. To see clearly is to look intently, without flinching, at all that is human, the degradation and the rarer glory, and also to witness, in what is visible, all that we are given to see of God.

I overhear in the fragments a quiet mingling of purpose and sorrow that speaks sometimes in letters home from the field or in journal entries or phrases of static-congested radio transmission. It is here that the unseen imprint of God seems almost perceptible in the martyrs’ astonishment at God’s presence in their dire straits, in their repeated insistence on an unfathomable peace that suffuses the elements surrounding them or, in some cases, in the mere acquiescence to living, though near the end many begin to have premonitions of death.

Here we glimpse what the martyrs themselves identify as the grace of God, perhaps somewhat nebulously for those of us looking on, reaching to catch the hem of his robe–where is God? They depend for strength on a power that reveals itself at the final gasp of their own frailty. In these fragments there is none of the requisite hyperbole of early martyrologies, but the resolution of those whose hearts have turned toward heaven. I mark the simple words: peace, rest, quiet.

From the Boxer uprising, more of the letter from Lizzie Atwater to her sister, written August 3, 1900:

Dear ones, I long for a sight of your dear faces, but I fear we shall not meet on earth. . . . I am preparing for the end very quietly and calmly. The Lord is wonderfully near, and He will not fail me. I was very restless and excited while there seemed a chance of life, but God has taken away that feeling, and now I just pray for grace to meet the terrible end bravely. The pain will soon be over, and oh the sweetness of the welcome above!

My little baby will go with me. I think God will give it to me in Heaven, and my dear mother will be so glad to see us. I cannot imagine the Savior’s welcome. Oh, that will compensate for all these days of suspense. Dear ones, live near to God and cling less closely to earth. There is no other way by which we can receive that peace from God which passeth understanding. . . . I must keep calm and still these hours. I do not regret coming to China, but am sorry I have done so little. My married life, two precious years, has been so very full of happiness. We will die together, my dear husband and I.

I used to dread separation. If we escape now it will be a miracle. I send my love to you all, and the dear friends who remember me.

Days after her husband’s body was found in Ecuador, January 12, 1956, Barbara Youderian writes in her journal:

God gave me this verse two days ago, Psalm 48:14, “For this God is our God for ever and ever: he shall be our guide even unto death.” As I came face to face with the news of Roj’s death, my heart was filled with praise. He was worthy of his homegoing. Help me, Lord, to be both mother and father, to know wisdom and instruction. . . . I wrote a letter to the mission family, trying to explain the peace I have.

All Lois Carlson hears is a screen of static from the shortwave radio, then these words pressing through the distance between them in her husband’s weakened voice: “Where I go from here I know not, only that it will be with Him. If by God’s grace I live, which I doubt, it will be to His glory.” September 24, 1956, Dr. Paul Carlson radios again, this time from Wasolo, on the other side of the Ubangi River, to where she is waiting for him in the Central African Republic. He has stayed with his patients, though the hospital he runs in the Belgian Congo has been overtaken by Simba nationalists. Lois waits near the static for days without a sound from him and then, in his last brief contact, a bit of paper dated October 21, is thrust into her hand. She reads, “I know I’m ready to meet my Lord, but my thought for you makes this more difficult. I trust that I might be a witness for Christ.” In the New Testament found in his jacket pocket, Carlson had written the date and a single word the day before the Simbas shot him. Peace.

The martyrs’ understatement of lack, dread, duration, their forward gaze, balance our own grief; their humility plays the counterpoint to overambitious eulogy.

Those who have wished to make of commemoration a warning or an idol have through history inflated the memory of the Christian dead. Though the spiritual purpose of the stories of martyrdom was clear from the beginning, over the years they began to accrue miracles and apocryphal codicils. Just as the dying Saint Stephen saw the heavens open to reveal the glory of God, the fragrance of bread rose from Polycarp’s burning flesh. His soul, it was said, lifted from his body in the form of a dove. This spiritualization makes Polycarp an allegorical Christ, the bread of life. The dove of his soul flying upward alerts readers to the presence of the Holy Spirit, who appeared first as a dove at the baptism of Jesus.

The historicity of several of the early passiones, verified through court records or corroborative eyewitness accounts, is far outweighed by wholly fabricated incidents and by the extravagant inflation of the numbers of dead. In the trumped-up testimony of exotic deaths we glimpse the earliest impulses of an emergent genre, consistent in style through the most recent of martyrologies. Tell me the story of her inspired expiration, and I will supply, along with allegorical miracles and rapturous apparitions, the demonized oppressors on stages hung with patterned psychic and political drapery. Lace collars, worn velvet shoes, a shriek on the tongue of a wild heifer. The din of spiritual bliss equates with wretched death. Under gilded domes and iced bridges, winter bent double. Blood like the tears of Jesus trickled from the old man’s palm.

This literature reports its news in a style foreign to those raised on contemporary journalism, because the purpose has less to do with conveying historical detail than with imparting spiritual truth.

The anonymous authors embed their accounts with hope, resolve, and the requisite goriness indigenous to the genre. They are riven with inspiration and slim on information–though maybe we will find an address where we are asked to send words of comfort to a Pakistani widow and her ten orphaned children, maybe a request for correspondence appealing for a prisoner’s release.

I am both drawn to and repulsed by these stories–their break from everyday language into heightened style is not idiosyncratic. Paired with the difficulty of finding words for spiritual experience is the problem of matching language to what we have been forced to see and hear and feel.

Poets and scholars, particularly since the First World War, have noted the shattering of common language as it approaches its own inadequacy to describe reality: war and its aftermath, human slaughter and debasem*nt. For our present consideration, I would add the violent deaths of the martyrs. In conditions of extremity, language tends either to revert to conventional usage as a means of retreating from the particulars toward the protective distance of the familiar, or we find it reaching into reality, experimentally, toward a diction that is sufficient for both incommunicable sorrow and the possibility of renewal.

Czeslaw Milosz urges on language the vigor necessary to attend the birth of horror, not simply to observe but to redeem through witness. I imagine this redemptive vigor to have been an informing impulse in the writing of the martyrs’ lives. First witness, then excess–it is the manner of all movements in writing and the arts: the real, then the imitation, the making-use-of.

Human-rights agencies’ reports and missionary bulletins can only point in the direction of the current crisis. They stack bodies as names on a list. They publish the random, smuggled photograph. Do not think these pictures to be isolated instances. They appear beside appeals to join in letter-writing campaigns to free others whose lives are threatened.

Here is the naked body of the Reverend Sylvio Claude, a Protestant pastor and human-rights campaigner active since the Duvalier regime in Haiti. He is surrounded by the mob who lynched him for protesting injustice under President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Method of torture: “the necklace,” a tire doused with gasoline hung around the victim’s neck and set on fire. One man with his hands on his hips steps on the dead man’s face. Another agency must certainly document the atrocities committed against the supporters of Aristide.

Here is a black-and-white image of Lai Manping, 22, who lies dead from beatings inflicted by the Public Security Bureau (PSB) following a raid on a house-church meeting in Taoyuan, Shaanxi province, China, 1994. In the photograph the bloodied offering bag, which has been thrown on top of him, rests across his chin. The PSB has arrested more than 90 Christians in an attempt to cover up the murder.

“Paul Uchibori’s children were martyred before his very eyes. He fell in a faint. When he revived, he said that he had seen his children in heaven and that they gave him great consolation. He died by being plunged into boiling water.”

“Leonard Massadeodezu was beheaded. He was encouraged to face death by seeing an apparition of his wife, Magdalene, who was martyred before him. . . . Others had their ears and noses cut off. Apples don’t fear the knives that peel them, because the cutting yields an aroma and a sweet taste that produces joy in children.”

“Brother Saw Ting Jing, a helper and co-worker of our mission, smuggled 20,000 copies of Bibles and “Tortured for Christ” into China. He was arrested by the communists in China and we do not know if he is alive. Let us pray for him.”

The voice telling these stories is that of Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a Romanian Jewish Christian who spent 14 years in prison, three of those in solitary confinement, because he claimed aloud what he believes is true–He is one and there is no second.

His work continues around the world in areas where Christianity is forbidden by law and by physical force. He calls his organization The Voice of the Martyrs. His monthly newsletter raises the impassioned plea that we love (with the love Christ offers) those who persecute Christians, that we assist (with supplies and letters and books) Christians who are being imprisoned and killed by those opposed to the free exercise of religion, that when faced with opposition to the gospel we endure to the end. He is now 86 years old, the age of Polycarp when his soul flew dovelike toward the sky.

Part of Wurmbrand’s service has been to document with photographs and letters the history of Christian martyrdom in the latter half of the twentieth century. His offices house a paper mausoleum unlike any the world has ever witnessed, save perhaps in the chronicles of John Foxe, whose multi-volumed account of martyrs through the sixteenth century might compare, though it lacks the color and immediacy engendered by one who has suffered torture himself. Wurmbrand exhorts us to prepare ourselves. Christians, don’t be caught off guard. When you are captured and imprisoned it will be too late to equip yourselves to face the enemy with love. Practice today. Practice breathing so that you are calm when questioned. Practice physical pain so that you don’t betray your brothers and sisters when put to the test.

A third of the Christian church today must operate in secrecy, under the threat of extermination, Wurmbrand reminds his readers. He exhorts to prayer rather than fear, to discipline instead of complacency. Accustomed to extremes, he adopts the language of immoderation for his own uses. At a wailing pitch, he warns against distinguishing ourselves from the suffering, a stance that in our century has allowed the perpetration of atrocity.

I think what it would mean for me, today, to have my faith taken from me–pilfered by my own inward doubts, or seized by some external tyranny. No one is demanding that I deny what I believe; but have I denied myself–living within conditions of privilege and safety much of the world has never known–and taken up my cross, daily, in order to follow Christ?

Were you there when they crucified my Lord? The spiritual invites us into the discomfort of his presence. I wonder, trembling, if I had been there, if I would have done what Peter did (after Jesus had washed Peter’s feet and served him a meal), insisting he had never known Christ, or what the Chinese girl did, freely testifying to the love of Jesus.

I am reminded by the vigilance of another witness, by his intimate identification with those who suffer, of one who carried a message of compassion and restraint despite the tortuous climb of the path ahead of him. Perhaps readying himself for what was to come, Martin Luther King, Jr., addressed those gathered at the funeral of the children killed by a bomb as they attended Sunday school at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963:

I hope you can find some consolation from Christianity’s affirmation that death is not the end. Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance. Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.

*********************

Susan Bergman is the author of “Anonymity” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a memoir. This essay is adapted from “Martyrs: Contemporary Writers on Modern Lives of Faith,” a collection of essays edited by Bergman (forthcoming in September from Harper San Francisco).

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The National Science Foundation recently announced the results of a survey quizzing Americans on basic scientific facts, such as whether light travels faster than sound. Did I say facts? One question did not cover facts but philosophy: “True or false: Humans developed from earlier species of animals.”

Fewer than half the respondents gave the “right” answer, which was “true.” Should we wring our hands over those who got it “wrong” and declare them scientifically ignorant? Of course not. They know the official line on human evolution; they simply disagree with it.

The fact that so many Americans disagree over human origins explains why it is a controversy that refuses to go away. Noisy debates are breaking out in school districts across the country–from Vermont to Ohio to California. The scientific establishment portrays dissenters from Darwinism as backwoods rubes trying to inject religion into the science classroom. But protesters assert that religion is already in the classroom. Darwinism is the foundation for a philosophy of naturalism, which is implacably opposed to any form of theism.

Many Darwinists are brutally honest about the religious implications. Francisco Ayala of the University of California says natural selection “exclude[s] God as the explanation accounting for the obvious design of organisms.” And Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins says Darwin “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

This atheistic presupposition is easily picked up by kids in the classroom. But in case it isn’t, the National Association of Biology Teachers has explicitly declared all life the outcome of “an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.” A popular high-school textbook published by Prentice Hall describes evolution as “random and undirected,” working “without either plan or purpose.”

Clearly, Darwinism is more than a neutral scientific theory. Yet Christians have been sharply divided in their responses to it. Stalwarts have held out against Darwinism, but often by employing a simplistic methodology that leaps straight from scriptural passages to scientific conclusions. Others, anxious not to be judged scientifically illiterate, have embraced Darwinism as God’s method of creation, but often by ignoring its inherent naturalism.

Darwinism begins with trivial changes in the color of moths and the size of finch beaks–which no one contests. But then it leaps to the metaphysical assertion that life is the product of completely natural, purposeless causes–which every Christian must contest.

Christians need to unite and meet this frontal attack with a reasoned apologetic on two levels: scientific and philosophical. Darwin offered natural selection as an alternative to design–the idea that an intelligent agent created life. But the latest scientific findings support design over Darwin.

For example, “Time” recently highlighted the Cambrian explosion, when virtually all the blueprints for animal life burst into being. The appearance of rich biological diversity within an instant of geological time directly contradicts Darwin’s theory of slow, gradual change.

Molecular biology is likewise creating headaches for Darwinists. As Michael Behe explains in “Darwin’s Black Box,” molecular systems in the cell are irreducibly complex–which means they cannot have originated by a gradual, step-by-step process. Think of a mousetrap: You can’t start with only a wooden base and catch a few mice, then add a spring and catch a few more mice. All the parts must be assembled simultaneously or the mousetrap does not work. In the same way, the complex systems in our cells must have originated all at once in order to function at all.

The discovery of DNA raises yet another scientific conundrum: What or who “wrote” the genetic code? Information theory tells us that a message is not determined by the material base that transmits it–just as this article was not produced by the chemicals in the ink and paper it is written on. In our experience, objects containing information, like books and computer programs, are products of intelligent agents. Since science is supposed to be based on experience, it should be open to the idea that DNA may likewise be the product of an intelligent agent.

Yet the issues raised by Darwinism go beyond science into philosophy. As Phillip Johnson argues in “Reason in the Balance,” Darwinism and design each functions as the basis for a complete world-view–each with dramatically different consequences. If life on earth is a product of blind, purposeless natural causes, then our own lives are cosmic accidents. There is no source of transcendent moral guidelines, no unique dignity for human life. On the other hand, if life is the product of foresight and design, then we were meant to be here. In God’s revelation we have a solid basis for morality and human dignity.

In short, at stake in this controversy is which world-view will permeate and shape our culture. “Where do we come from?” is not an esoteric question relevant only to scientists. It is the beginning and basis of all we believe. And that’s why Christians must come together, craft a credible apologetic, and then refuse to back down.

Even if it means we have to keep on marking the “wrong” answer.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

More precisely, the more religious people are, the more politically conservative they tend to be. The study found that the conservatism extends to beliefs regarding international security as well as social issues such as abortion and hom*osexuality.

However, while evangelicals claim to hold many of their conservative views because of their religious beliefs, much of that conservatism has been drawn from other sources, according to the study.

On the issues of abortion and hom*osexual marriage, for example, religious beliefs are exceptionally influential. Of the pro-life respondents to the survey, 51 percent said their religious beliefs were the most important factor in their views of abortion. Similarly, 52 percent of those opposing hom*osexual marriage say the reason they hold their views is their religious beliefs.

MIXED MESSAGES: For other issues, however, religious beliefs played much less of a role. For instance, the survey notes, “Although the plight of the poor is a common theme in most religious traditions, and was the issue most commonly mentioned by churchgoing respondents as being discussed by their clergy (87 percent), there is little evidence of direct religious influence on public opinion about government assistance to the poor.” Religious beliefs were the most important influence on their attitudes on this issue for 6 percent of the respondents. Similarly, only 3 percent of Americans say their views on the environment have been mostly influenced by their religious beliefs.

“For social issues like abortion and gay marriage, in the evangelical church in particular you’ve had a very consistent message,” says John C. Green, an academic consultant for the project and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “For issues like the environment, the messages are mixed.”

Although religious respondents claimed that for some issues their religious beliefs were not the most influential factor in deciding views on policy issues, the Pew study demonstrates that one’s religious beliefs have a bearing on “political affiliation, political values, policy attitudes, and candidate choice.” The study attributes the link between religiosity and political conservatism to the increased politicization of white evangelical Protestants. “The conservatism of white evangelical Protestants is clearly the most powerful religious force in politics today,” the report says.

The study indicates nearly a quarter of registered voters are white evangelical Protestants. It should be noted, however, that the study’s criteria for naming respondents as evangelicals was if they identified themselves as evangelical or born again.

The study also found that Americans are increasingly supportive of politics in the churches. While in 1965 a Gallup poll found that Americans thought “churches” should keep out of political matters by a 53 percent to 40 percent majority, opinion has flipped. A 54 percent to 43 percent majority now think that churches should express their political views.

About 20 percent of congregants say that they hear about candidates and elections from the pulpit. Those who hear the most politics from preachers are blacks (47 percent) and white evangelical Protestants (20 percent).

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CBF’s genesis five years ago signified Baptist moderates’ concession of control of the SBC–after more than a decade of struggle–to the SBC’s conservative wing. CBF has grown from under 400 supporting churches in 1991 to more than 1,400 today.

In 1991, the movement’s final organizational destination was uncertain. That is still the case in 1996, as nearly 4,000 delegates gathered June 27 to 29 in Richmond for the group’s annual general assembly.

Last summer, a study commission was appointed to address whether the CBF should “become a separate convention.” The commission, chaired by W. Randall Lolley, former president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, concluded among other things that CBF constituents can be found at various stages of the grieving process. Some still hold out hope for reconciliation with the SBC. Others have accepted that the theological gap between CBF and SBC cannot be bridged; they want to make that recognition official by declaring CBF a separate convention or denomination.

The CBF maintains that by insisting on scriptural inerrancy–defined partly in terms of opposition to women’s ordination–the SBC has abandoned historic Baptist principles such as soul liberty, freedom of conscience, and individual church autonomy.

A BREAK EVENTUALLY? Although the CBF overwhelmingly rejected the proposal to break with the SBC–in a vote determined by delegates rising to their feet–a majority of those surveyed by the study commission say the CBF should eventually become a separate convention when the time is right. Lolley himself favors such a stand: “I believe this group needs some ‘soak time,’ some visioning time.”

Lolley and other opponents of an immediate break cite practical considerations, not the least of which is the concern that individual churches might split if the perception is that they are being forced to choose between CBF and SBC. Also, some churches could lose property by associating with CBF, and some pastors risk losing SBC retirement benefits.

Another concern is the uncertainty about whether CBF, without organizing more formally, will be recognized by the military, hospitals, and other entities as having the authority to endorse chaplains. Up to now, CBF clergy often have been endorsed through the Home Mission Board of the SBC, but there are no guarantees that will continue.

For some within CBF, the issue boils down to identity. They are weary of being considered a mere splinter group of the SBC. Retired military chaplain Bill Montgomery, who proposed the resolution favoring separation, wrote in the June 27 issue of Baptists Today, “Had we declared ourselves a separate convention from the beginning, I firmly believe we would be much farther along on our journey than we presently are.”

Baptists Today editor Jack Harwell says, “Bedrock Baptist principles have been so badly compromised (by the SBC) that we must take a stand. We can’t go on for long as an ethereal, nebulous fellowship with an unclear statement of purpose. Our people have been conditioned to function within structures.”

Eileen Campbell-Reed, a pastor and a member of the study commission, maintains that loyalty prevents some Baptists from making the complete break with the SBC. “Some have already had all the breaking away they can stand,” she says. According to Campbell-Reed, some people have trouble separating their Christian faith from their Southern Baptist tradition. “CBF needs to give a more adequate pastoral response to these concerns,” she says. “People need to be assured that CBF is a place where God is at work and that their faith will survive.”

David Dockery, president of Union University, a Baptist school in Jackson, Tennessee, has mixed feelings about the CBF. “It is unfortunate any time there is division in the body of Christ, but it is good if the Lord can take that division and multiply efforts from it to advance his kingdom’s work,” Dockery says. “I’ve tried to relate constructively with Cooperative Baptist people, but my theological loyalties lie with the SBC.”

DECLINING DENOMINATIONALISM: Campbell-Reed ultimately opposes the effort to form a denomination. “Denominationalism is on the decline,” she observes. “It’s dying. I think we have an opportunity to become something new, a different way of organizing the church and its mission.”

Stan Hastey, executive director of the Alliance of Baptists, agrees: “The trends are away from top-heavy, centralized denominational structures. Churches have got to get used to the idea that we are very much in a cafeteria-style mode of delivering services, and it will be that way for the foreseeable future.”

One of the tasks facing CBF leadership–especially its coordinator search committee–is replacing retiring Cecil Sherman, who has held the top coordinator office since the fellowship’s inception. Many had hoped a new coordinator would be in place by this year’s general assembly. Instead, retired Atlanta banker Tommy Boland will serve as interim coordinator the rest of the year.

Hastey interprets the delay as a sign of an appropriately thorough selection process. “The second generation of leaders is very important for the CBF,” he says. “I have urged that we find a leader who is capable of bridging the gaps in areas I refer to as the three g’s: geography, generation, and gender.”

While Cooperative Baptists are not in agreement about how to move forward, few, if any, want to be identified as Southern Baptists. As Sherman said in his farewell address, the SBC has been taken over by “people who have no knowledge of Baptist ways.”

From all appearances, the CBF has not allowed the issues it faces to dissuade it from its highest priority: missions. Some 70 percent of the group’s $14 million annual budget is earmarked for missions. More than 30 new CBF missionaries were commissioned in Richmond, bringing the total to 150.

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

As the first Republican-dominated session of Congress in 40 years nears an end, conservative profamily activists are still seeking major legislative victories that will turn their agenda into lasting changes in public policy.

Conservative Christian and profamily voters were considered a key part of the Republican coalition that took control of both the House and the Senate after the 1994 elections. The movement has parlayed that political clout into significant influence this congressional session, introducing numerous bills, testifying at hearings, blocking controversial administration appointments, and helping to shape the overall Republican agenda. Yet, while conservative profamily groups have seen several first-round victories on bills they supported, to date, major laws codifying their agenda remain elusive.

Although there has been congressional action on several items in the Christian Coalition’s 10-point Contract with the American Family (CT, July 17, 1995, p. 54)–which was generally supported by several evangelical and profamily groups–there also have been setbacks.

SHORT-LIVED TRIUMPHS: On the issue of p*rnography, Congress in February adopted the Communications Decency Act as part of the telecommunications bill. The act prohibited sending “indecent material” to children via the Internet. However, in June a federal court struck down the measure as unconstitutional.

Major action on another priority item, restricting abortion, also has been stymied. President Clinton vetoed legislation passed by the House and the Senate that would have outlawed the controversial late-term abortion procedure known as “partial-birth abortion.” Opponents of abortion are still hopeful they will be able to muster enough votes to override the veto.

Amendments were passed restoring the ban on financing abortions at military hospitals and repealing requirements that all obstetricians and gynecologists be trained in doing abortions.

Efforts to provide new tax benefits to families similarly fell victim to political budgetary haggling between Congress and the administration.

President Clinton vetoed the Budget Reconciliation Package that had included a $500 per child tax credit. Conservative profamily groups have long advocated such a tax credit.

Proposals to establish new forms of “school choice” also were blocked. The House approved a pilot scholarship program for the District of Columbia that would allow parents to use education vouchers at private schools, including religious ones. However, the program was dropped during negotiations over the final legislation after Clinton promised to veto any voucher plan.

Profamily groups do claim victory in their effort to privatize the arts and other federal agencies. Although they were not able to defund completely the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), they did successfully convince Congress to reduce the nea budget by 40 percent.

STILL IN THE HOPPER: Several additional issues pushed by the Christian Coalition and other groups are still in play during the final weeks of this session. Two bills have been introduced that would allow more religious expression in public schools.

Supporters are hopeful the “Religious Equality Amendment” will come to a vote before the session ends. After the 1994 elections, House Speaker Newt Gingrich pledged there would be a vote on school prayer by Independence Day 1995.

The Parental Rights and Responsibilities Act of 1996, introduced by Rep. Steve Largent (R-Okla.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), also is working its way through the system. The bill would prohibit any federal, state, or local government from “interfering with or usurping the right of a parent to govern the upbringing of a child.” However, there is strong opposition to the measure.

The Christian Coalition says it is “still working” on other contract items, such as granting local control of education, establishing new federal support for private charities, and implementing a system of crime victim restitution. But little further action is likely.

DEFENDING MARRIAGE: Other family-related measures not included in the Contract with the American Family could still be enacted before Congress adjourns for the election recess. For example, the Family Research Council (FRC) and other groups have been aggressively promoting the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage for federal codes and establishes the rights of states to make laws governing marriage for their citizens. The measure, approved by the House 342 to 67 on July 12, is aimed at same-sex marriages. Clinton has indicated he would sign the bill if it passes the Senate.

Overall, profamily leaders maintain that they are pleased with their progress to date. “This Congress reacted well to the profamily agenda,” says Brian Lopina, director of government affairs for the Christian Coalition. Lopina says profamily groups understand that lasting changes will not occur overnight.

“In retrospect, I think this Congress did quite a bit,” agrees Gary Bauer, president of the FRC. “It’s been either liberal judges or a recalcitrant President that prevented these things from becoming law.”

Political analysts say the success of conservative Christian and profamily groups is not just measured by how much legislation they helped pass this session of Congress.

“They have not yet fully translated their new influence into substantial victories, but this takes time,” says John Green, director of the Ray Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “They may very well be laying the groundwork now for some big victories next year or the year after.”

Copyright © 1996 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

One week before the July 3 presidential runoff, newly appointed security chief Alexander Lebed unleashed a barrage against “Western cultural expansion” and “Western preachers,” calling attention to sentiments already expressed by reactionary political and religious camps.

During the past three years, the Russian Orthodox Church has advocated special privileges and support for Russian Orthodoxy. Other so-called minority religions would be allowed to exist, but without privileges or support.

Lebed, in an earlier attack on Western influence, specifically denounced the Mormon Church. “There is no place for them on our land. They should be outlawed.” Lebed called Mormons “mold and filth which have come to destroy the state.” There are around 300 Mormon missionaries in Russia.

Lebed later apologized, saying he did not mean to “offend anyone,” yet he reiterated that he is “categorically against” any “strangers on our territory.”

“It is not known how much power Lebed will have in Yeltsin’s new government,” says Peter Deyneka of the Wheaton, Illinois-based Russian Ministries. “However, he is very nationalistic and clearly represents rising anti-Western sentiment.”

RESTRICTIONS IN the WORKS: Some form of restrictions on religion appear inevitable. The freedom of religion law enacted in 1990 and currently part of the Russian Constitution allows for complete freedom. But the state Duma is considering new legislation to enhance state oversight of religious activity.

Lev Levinson, assistant to the deputy director of the Duma’s committee on religion, insists there is “nothing dangerous” in the draft law. Foreign religious organizations will still have the right to open offices and carry out activities. “But they must get registered,” he says.

Vsevolod Chaplin, spokesperson for the Moscow patriarchate, believes that the new draft expresses a “good balance.” He says, “It is not restrictive, but puts some order into how religious organizations can be registered.”

Chaplin says the Orthodox church is not completely happy with the draft law because officials wanted foreign religious groups to be able to register in Russia only at the request of a Russian religious organization. But the proposed law says that the decision will continue to be made by the minister of justice.

ORTHODOX PREFERENCE: Missions leaders view Yeltsin’s defeat of Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the July 3 runoff election as a clear victory since Zyuganov had vowed if elected to ban foreign missionaries and to restrict all indigenous religions other than Orthodoxy.

More than 70 percent of the population claims affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church. Catholics and Protestants are less than 3 percent combined. Opinion polls show the Orthodox church is the country’s most venerated institution.

Although Yeltsin has a cozy relationship with the Orthodox church, he has repeatedly resisted attempts to curtail the religious liberties of other faiths.

The prevailing consensus, however, is that American-style religious liberty will never come to Russia. “The American system of freedom of religion doesn’t work in Russia, because we have a tradition of a large role of state in religion,” says Sergey Markov, an associate with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “The state is inclined to give benefits to one religion.”

Yet, Markov and others do not forecast the enactment of religious restrictions this year. Confronted by a disgruntled public while on the campaign trail, Yeltsin promised voters many social and economic improvements. Keeping those promises will be expensive, especially since the Russian economy faces ongoing problems.

OTHER THREATS TO FREEDOM: There may not be overt laws passed to restrict foreign missionaries, but some fear that visa denials and other means will become more widely used to control missions activity.

In light of Russia’s tenuous hold on religious freedom, Deyneka says Western missionaries in Russia must put a priority on printing more Christian literature, establishing local theological training, and encouraging evangelism and church planting by Russians.

Deyneka says, “We should anticipate the future and commit ourselves to strategies that will enhance and equip the national church.”

A recent poll indicated that 80 percent of Russians believe that all denominations should have equal rights in Russia. But despite constitutional protections for religion, local authorities in 20 regions of Russia have adopted legislation favoring Orthodoxy.

The ordinances passed in these regions bear a striking resemblance. They allow local authorities to provide direct support and privileges to the “traditional” Orthodox church. At the same time, they can restrict activities of other religious groups by denying access to public places.

So far, the Russian uncertainty over religious freedom has not impaired outreach. Since the introduction of democratic reforms, more than 110 new Bible schools and seminaries and an estimated 4,000 evangelical churches have been established.

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Although Asian enrollments at American seminaries have been growing quickly, this development has not always met the expectations of local Asian churches in America.

Last year, 4,253 Asians were enrolled at Association of Theological Schools member institutions. This 60 percent increase from 1991 makes Asian seminarians, a large portion of whom are Korean, the fastest-growing major ethnic group.

Yet, Asian congregations often have great difficulty filling their pulpits because of stringent requirements or inadequate financial resources.

Jim-Bob Park, English-ministry pastor at Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, one of the largest Korean churches in the United States, has been intensively searching for an associate pastor. “I still haven’t received a single application,” he says.

“The church wants people to meet age requirements, marital requirements, bilingual ability requirements, and experience requirements,” Park says. “It’s good and bad. The church knows what it wants. But it’s driving candidates away.”

While more and more Asian Americans are joining the ranks of the ordained, many have chosen not to devote themselves to the first-generation Asian church.

In addition to the stiff requirements that some of these churches have, Asian churches reflect cultural values that show deference to those who are older. As a result, Park believes there is another reason for the lack of pastoral candidates: “Pastors for second-generation ministry feel like they’re treated as children, as second-class citizens.”

John Kim, a second-generation Korean-American pastor in Columbia, Maryland, says that the first generation is not all to blame, however. “Restrictive situations can lead to frustration among young pastors,” Kim says. “But English-ministry pastors have a certain lack of willingness to persevere sometimes. And as a result, churches can’t grow in their ministry to young people.”

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Asian churches in the United States are discovering that despite their spectacular growth they are simultaneously losing their children. At an alarming rate, many young believers who have grown up in these Asian congregations are now choosing to leave not only their home churches, but possibly their Christian faith as well.

In many respects, the Asian church in the United States has been hugely successful since the mid-1960s, when immigration restrictions were dramatically relaxed.

The surge in Asian immigration led to an explosion of new churches. But the flip side of this success story has been a silent exodus of church-raised young people who find their immigrant churches irrelevant, culturally stifling, and ill equipped to develop them spiritually for life in the multicultural 1990s.

“The Korean church I attended as a child was uncomfortable for kids, with no English sermon or children’s program,” says 34-year-old John Lee from Venice, California. “Church was more for my parents. There wasn’t a lot for us in terms of learning about the Bible and Christianity.”

Many in younger generations either immigrated with their parents at a very early age or were born in the United States, placing them in a stressful bicultural context of balancing the oft-conflicting Asian parental and American cultural influences.

Of those young people who have left their parents’ churches, few have chosen to attend non-Asian churches. “The second generation is being lost,” says Allen Thompson, coordinator for multicultural church planting in the Presbyterian Church of America. “They are the mission field we need to focus on.”

MAKING MINISTRY RELEVANT: Dave Gibbons, a half-Korean, half-Caucasian pastor, spent five years working in a first-generation Korean church, developing an English-only ministry for its young people. One day, he was sitting in a required elders’ meeting, conducted entirely in Korean, which he was unable to understand fully. As he read his Bible instead, he was subsequently stunned by a realization about his own efforts. “I was trying to pour new wine into old wineskins,” he explains. “In the process, I was raising a generation of spoiled saints, with no accountability or ownership of their own ministry, because the parents had always been in charge of the church.”

Other Asian-American leaders have started having similar realizations. And for the past several years, these emerging leaders have been remolding Christian outreach to Asian Americans. They aspire to engage a disaffected generation of former churchgoers, while retaining a strong Asian dimension to their ministry.

This task of reclaiming the younger generations is difficult in different ways for each Asian ethnic group. While Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans share similarities, their history in America, immigration patterns, and ethnic heritages differ significantly and pose distinctive problems.

Asian churches are confronted with similar dilemmas of identity and mission: whether their principal role is to serve new immigrants, to disciple an Americanized next generation, to blend their congregations into Christian America, or to move their churches into some yet undiscovered form and function.

RESISTING DISCRIMINATION: Of the three major East Asian groups that have immigrated in large numbers to the United States, the Chinese possess not only the longest history in America but also have suffered intense immigration discrimination in the way of now-amended federal laws.

In coping with decades of discrimination, Chinese Christians responded by bonding tightly to their ethnic culture and language. “The Chinese chose as their principal church paradigm to have Chinese-language-only churches,” says Stan Inouye, founder and director of Iwa, an Asian-American ministry-consulting organization in Monrovia, California. In addition, many Chinese-American churches have formed schools within their congregations to teach Chinese language and culture.

But as the Chinese churches in America matured, significant change has been avoided or resisted, especially in introducing English worship services. The drive to preserve their culture and to be a safe haven for new immigrants has had unintended negative consequences for their children–American-born Chinese, known as ABCs.

As a result, Inouye says Chinese churches have lost countless ABCs who desired separate services in English for their comprehension and spiritual growth. Samuel Ling, director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton (Ill.) College, estimates that only about 4 percent of ABCs–who constitute 40 percent of the U.S. Chinese population–are integrated into the Chinese church.

For the Chinese church, as well as among Asian-American Christians overall, the intense emphasis on new immigrants is easy to understand. Federal census projections report that Asian immigrants are the nation’s fastest-growing group. The total number of Asian Americans is expected to increase to 13.2 million by 2005, an 81 percent increase from 1990.

Sang Hyun Lee, systematic theology professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, says, “As [Asians] come together in their ethnic churches, they experience an inversion of status, a turning upside down of the way they are viewed in the society outside.”

Without the linguistic and cultural barriers that Asian immigrants usually face in mainstream America, the church becomes a place where new Asian Americans feel comfortable and where fresh immigrants can learn from and support each other. Chinese church-growth statistics reveal how immigrants are flocking into new congregations. There was a 500 percent growth in Chinese churches in America between 1968 and 1990, for a total of 644 congregations.

But this growth has not effectively stemmed the departure of many of their American-born children in search of cultural relevance and English-language church services.

GROWING PAINS: “The Korean church in America, in general, is very busy just trying to survive,” says Daniel Lee, a first-generation Korean pastor at Global Mission Church (GMC) in Silver Spring, Maryland. “It hasn’t had enough energy or time to focus on the second generation yet.”

Koreans have embraced Christian belief as have few other Asian groups. More than 20 percent of the population in South Korea is Christian, and the percentage is much higher among Korean immigrants to the United States, with more than 2,000 Korean churches, attended by about 1 million Korean Americans. Some 70 percent of first-generation Korean Americans are affiliated with a Korean church in the United States today.

This is an extremely high church-to-person ratio made all the more remarkable because it has taken place in the past 30 years. In 1965, federal immigration reform abolished restrictive quotas that for decades had severely limited Asian immigration. In addition to opening the doors to previously excluded Asian immigrants, the 1965 law included provisions that facilitated the entry of immigrant family members. Koreans in particular took advantage of the new law, often emigrating as entire families, one factor that has contributed to skyrocketing Korean immigration.

As Korean churches in America developed, they were immediately faced with the costly proposition of developing ministries for all generations at once. This problem was intensified as children of the immigrant wave became young adults attuned to life in the American mainstream.

A recent study by pastor Robert Oh surveyed Southern Californian second-generation Korean Americans who are members of first-generation Korean churches and found that 80 percent hope to attend a church where English is the primary language.

Scholars Young Pai, Delores Pemberton, and John Worley from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Education have also studied Korean-American adolescents, and they believe there is a deeper problem. “Korean-American young people at the college level are not likely to seek out either Korean or Caucasian churches,” they wrote. “[They] may tend to feel uncomfortable in both Korean and Caucasian churches.”

OVERASSIMILATION? For centuries, the Japanese have had a near legendary resistance to Christian evangelization. And among the 870,000 Japanese Americans, there are only 195 Christian churches and about 35,000 Christian believers, according to John Mizuki of the Japanese Evangelization Center in Pasadena, California. However, churches for Japanese Americans have not had the same disputes over language as the Koreans or Chinese. “Because the Japanese assimilated very quickly, the services were divided into English and Japanese long ago,” says Carl Omaye, senior pastor of the 75-year-old Anaheim Free Methodist Church. “We have three or four generations coexisting together in our church.”

And leadership problems have not been as prominent. During World War II, the forced internment of Japanese Americans in relocation camps had a profound and lasting impact on the Japanese church.

In this trying period, ministry consultant Inouye notes that Japanese-Americans “met together generationally in the camps and developed structures of leadership, which carried into the formation of church leadership after the war ended.

“So churches had different paradigms of leadership coexisting under one roof–one style led by the first generation, the issei, and [another] style led by the second.”

The Japanese-American church also does not have the challenge of coping with an ongoing spurt of new immigrants and rapid population growth. Japanese immigration peaked around 1910.

Nevertheless, Japanese-American Christians still have difficulty retaining their believing children within an ethnic church context.

“Many Japanese find themselves more comfortable in an English environment, which means we’ll see fewer and fewer specifically Japanese churches,” says church history scholar Tim Tseng. “I don’t see too many new Japanese-only churches forming unless the younger generations start them–which I doubt they will.”

The maturing Japanese-American church is caught between an ethnic culture resistant to Christianity and a population of highly assimilated third- and fourth-generation American believers who have a weakened loyalty to their ethnic Christian identity.

PRESSURE POINTS: On top of the intense attention paid to native language, ethnic discrimination, and immigrant needs, Asian-American Christians grapple with additional pressure points concerning the demands for leadership equality, the role of ethnic identity in the church, and the importance of spiritual development. Unless these added difficulties are solved, they have the potential to hinder church growth among younger people.

These young people, often influenced by Western ideals of democracy and equality, tend to differ with Asian cultural views on hierarchy and authority. “In Asian culture, you have a very slow giving over of authority and control to the younger generation,” says Robert Goette, director of the Chicagoland Asian-American Church Planting Project. “Often, the control resides with the parents until they die.”

Scholar Tseng agrees: “Unless the first-generation leaders are able to give second-generation pastors the freedom to lead, their young people will not go to these churches. First-generation pastors need to be aware of this dynamic.”

Second-generation leaders also note their responsibility in this process of partnership with the first-generation leaders. “The relationships between the first- and second-generation pastors has to be stronger,” says Grace Shim of Parkwood Community Church in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a second-generation, Asian-American congregation. “If there are two pastors who are willing to compromise and put aside cultural differences, there’s hope.”

Another area in which older and younger generations frequently differ is in the preference of the first-generation members for a monocultural setting, while the younger generations often feel restricted by such rigid ethnic-identity boundaries.

While Peter Cha, also of Parkwood Community Church, was serving as a young adults’ pastor in a first-generation Asian church setting, he began to see a growing number of non-Koreans coming to the church as well as an increasing number of interracial marriages.

“The first-generation parents began to complain to me about it,” Cha says. “The nature of the immigrant church is that the mission of that group is to provide for the needs of the first generation. And while they want a vibrant second-generation ministry, they find it hard to deal with the side effects, like having non-Koreans come.”

But today’s Asian Americans live in a society where they are typically spending less time in a monocultural setting. And even for those who are fully Asian in their ethnicity, acculturation has often made the ethnic-enclave atmosphere of the first-generation church unbearable for them.

When Grace and Tony Yang moved to Southern California, they spent many Sundays hopping from one Korean church to another, but the process of finding a good fit was difficult. “Most churches we went to didn’t have services in English,” says Tony Yang, a second-generation Korean American.

Gibbons, who left the Korean church setting to plant his own independent church with a more multiethnic flavor, believes that the younger generations require churches with a broader cultural vision in order to feel comfortable.

“Today’s busters think that if you’re not being multiethnic in your endeavors, you’re not real,” he says. “They see the diversity everywhere else in society, but if they don’t see it in the church, they think the church is superficial.”

A third pressure point concerns providing quality spiritual education and training for the younger generations in first-generation churches. Due to the lack of teaching resources in Asian churches, or the decision to conduct services and teaching times in Asian languages, the quality of spiritual instruction the young people receive often falls short of their needs. “Parents assumed that if you just sent the kids to church through high school, they’d come out being good Christians,” Global Mission’s Lee says. “We all thought our kids would go to church in college. That was a very naive thought.”

In addition, Asian parenting styles are frequently based on the Confucian values of hierarchy and authority. Charles Kim, a 29-year-old coordinator of youth programs at Oriental Mission Church in Los Angeles, says, “The kids don’t own the faith. They come to church because they are forced to. They can’t differentiate between Asian culture and Christianity, and then they often develop a hatred of the culture–which they then extend to Christianity.”

Gibbons also notes that the second generation has to take responsibility for its own watered-down faith. “We have been given ministries on a silver platter. We have had all of our ministries provided for us, which has resulted in a weak Christianity.”

ENDING THE EXODUS: As Asian-American Christian leaders have assessed their congregational needs and opportunities, they have undertaken three principal means of solving their problems: renewing traditionalism, developing a multiethnic approach, and planting new churches.

Julia Yim, a youth pastor at the First United Methodist Church in Flushing, New York, has chosen to sacrifice for the first-generation church. “I get tempted to leave the Korean church millions of times,” says Yim. “But it’s helped to build my character, learning to be a servant.”

Others in the first-generation, traditional church setting have tried to develop what is called the “church within a church” model, where the English ministry forms its own autonomous body within the first-generation context. Lee’s GMC is an example of a first-generation church that has tried this approach, and he believes it has aided the church in keeping more of its young people than it could have without the independent leadership of the second generation.

A handful of Asian-American churches, rich in many resources, are developing into multiethnic congregations with a wide range of Asians and non-Asians as members. Originally a Japanese-American church, Evergreen Baptist Church in Rosemead, California, today is a congregation of 1,000 with ministries to many races and generations.

In contrast, church planting in the Asian community can be a delicate matter. Before planting New Song Community Church near Los Angeles, Gibbons obtained the blessing of first-generation Korean church leaders, explaining he was not trying to steal their young people but was partnering with them to reach unchurched Asian Americans. “This is where the Asian-American churches have erred so far,” Gibbons says. “We have not gotten the blessing of the first-generation leaders.”

Nonetheless, church planter Goette estimates that there are 20 second-generation Korean-American churches and about 70 more pan-Asian American churches, nearly all of them relatively new congregations.

CALL TO PARTNERSHIP: The success of churches such as New Song in forging new partnerships between generations has given a measure of hope to those ministering to younger Asian Americans.

However, many Asian churches in the United States do not have ready access to the financial and personal resources to duplicate New Song’s success. Other leaders are cautious, predicting that it may take years to reverse the generational exodus of young Asians from their home churches. Due to the lack of young Chinese-American pastors, for example, scholar Ling says, “I don’t think we’ll see vast improvement for another 10 to 20 years.”

Meanwhile, Goette says more non-Asian churches should view Asian Americans as an unchurched people group for specialized evangelistic outreach. “We shouldn’t assume that just because these Asian Americans were born here and speak English that they will want to come to our Anglo churches.”

While innovative strides have been taken recently in the Asian-American church, a formidable task remains in retaining and reclaiming Asian-American young people.

Gibbons believes that the key may be for the younger generations to look at the legacy native Asian churches have already left, and then follow their example.

“The reason the Korean church is thriving is because of its commitment to prayer and willingness to sacrifice,” he says. “We of the younger generations need to be given the same opportunity to sacrifice, and we need to stress this value in our churches, so that we are willing to die for one another. Then, maybe, we’ll be able to accomplish great things in the church.”

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