OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

For several semesters I have been teaching a class or two at Dallas Christian College, which is a delightful experience. This semester I have in class Jim Sutherland, a 45-year old man whose essay "From Running To Rejoicing" was published in The Christian Ranchman. He tells the cowboy readers that he spent 30 years drinking, partying, and going to rodeos. He'd always been a cowboy. he told them, and that meant girls, parties. fights. and alcohol. Finally his boss on the feedlot urged him to go to church. In I 987 he accepted Jesus Christ as the Lord of his life, and now his world is different. He told his cowboy friends that he hasn't taken a drink since he turned to Christ. A few months after his conversion he felt a call from God to preach the gospel, and so he is studying at Dallas Christian College and will minister among Christian Churches. We have studied the history of the Stone-Campbell movement together. using my book as the text. Jim's favorite pioneer is Raccoon John Smith. That figures!

We have a new piece of furniture at our house, an electric lift chair, which at the press of a button lifts Mother Pitts from a sitting position to a standing position. Ouida has needed this kind of help in caring for her mother, especially when I am absent from home. Now that we see what the chair will do, Ouida and I eye it in reference to our own future. We wonder if the two of us might someday have fun, each of us with such a chair, sitting across the room from each other zipping up and down at will. It sounds more interesting than a lot of things I see old folks doing or not doing.

A new journal that cuts across all party lines within the Stone-Campbell tradition is Refreshing Waters, 10701 W. 124th Ave., Cedar Lake, In. 46303, edited by Given O. Blakely and published quarterly by Project Plus 60, a team of some 40 individuals who are more than threescore years old. The editor describes the new journal as "a unified effort to clarify the nature and content of the Gospel of Christ." The first number has articles by W. F. Lown, Carl Ketcherside, Given O. Blakely, R. L. Kilpatrick, Harold Key, Cecil Hook, Buff Scott, Roy Key, Fred P. Thompson, Jr., J. Ervin Waters, Norman Parks, Fred O. Blakely, and Leroy Garrett, as well as voices from the past, including Dean Walker and Martin Luther. You will find this journal filled with substantive material. The subscription rate is $10 a year.

We can thank God for the doors that are being opened to the gospel behind the Iron Curtain, the latest instance being Billy Graham's invitation to preach in Budapest, Hungary. It will be a mass gathering of people from all over Hungary and other Eastern European countries in Hungary's largest outdoor stadium. The date is July 29.

A new denomination is being organized out of the Stone-Campbell tradition called Christ's Church Fellowship. Some 250 pastors have expressed interest in joining. It will be charismatic in that its doctrinal statement will affirm that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit are operative today. It emerged from the Conference on Spiritual Renewal, which began in 1980 as a gathering of Restoration charismatics. It will be an organized denomination with a logo that will identify it as such on the church bulletin board.

Virtually every denomination is being traumatized over the issue of a greater role for women in the ministry of the church. A Lutheran pastor (Missouri Synod) may face heresy charges for an article he wrote in one of the church's publication. He called for a more open view of women's ministry, urging his church to follow society's lead in allowing women the freedom to perform roles other than traditional ones. He believes such values as diversity and inclusiveness will ultimately destroy centuries of oppression against women, including sexism in the church. His article accused the church of "wearing cultural blinders" and called for a return to the way Jesus and the apostles treated women. The Missouri Synod Lutheran Church holds that the Scriptures forbid the ordination of women.  

I have recently had delightful visits with churches in Lubbock, Dallas, and Jacksonville, Illinois. In Lubbock was with the Vandalia Church of Christ and in Dallas with the Piedmont Church of Christ. In Jacksonville, where Ouida and I lived 30 years ago when I was a professor at MacMurray College, I was with both the Church of Christ and the Community Christian Church (Independent) in a series on our heritage in history and in Scripture. It was thrilling to see our people, so long separated by sense-less divisions, visiting each other and studying their common heritage. Such would not have been possible even a few years ago. A few days in Jacksonville also gave me opportunity to call on some old professor friends. It was sad to find two of them, once young and busily engaged in academic work, wasting away in a nursing home and barely conscious of what is going on. Other professors that I knew have passed on, hardly remembered anymore. Younger ones have taken their place and the academic world moves on. It leaves one wondering if Ecclesiastes does not have a point in saying "Ail is vanity and a striving after wind." What a difference it makes to be a believer! But you don't find an abundance of believers on college and university faculties.