OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

Ouida spent the summer caring for her mother, entertaining visitors, mailing books, keeping house, and, most significantly, welcoming a great nephew into the world, born July 30 here in Denton to Ouida’s niece who is more like a daughter (also a nurse who has helped us with Mother Pitts all these years, who, now that she has her baby and her husband his Ph. D. degree, will be moving away, a sad time for us). I did some traveling, including a trip to the Gulf of Mexico with grandson Ashley for deep sea fishing (his idea more than mine!), and got some work done on revising my The Stone-Campbell Movement, which is presently out of print.

Albania has been described as the world’s first totally atheistic state. Every church and mosque in the country was either destroyed or turned into a government facility. Those who succeeded in smuggling Bibles into other communist countries found Albania almost impossible. That is why one of our missionaries in Eastern Europe, Bill Smith, calls it a miracle that he is now able to enter this country and conduct a major evangelistic campaign sanctioned and assisted by the Albanian government. In a recent letter Bill refers to all the prayers that went up to God in behalf of that country, and concludes with: “Those prayers have lifted a layer of darkness over this very isolated nation of 2.6 million on the Adriatic Sea.”

Around the world 3,500 new congregations of believers are being organized every week. In Africa alone there are 20,000 new Christians every day. Africa is now considered to be 40% Christian, compared to only 3% in 1900. In China it is estimated that believers grow at a rate of 28,000 daily. The world over believers are added at the rate of 70,000 a day, but still we fall behind the population growth.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre recently died at age 85, leaving behind the first schism in the Roman Catholic Church since 1870 that numbers 10,000 followers and 300 priests. He was excommunicated in 1988 for consecrating four bishops to help carry on his battle to return the Latin mass and other traditions rejected by Vatican reformers.

During the summer the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association sponsored a school of evangelism in Moscow for 4,902 pastors and evangelists who came from all over Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, many of them from small, struggling, persecuted churches. The purpose was to learn how to spread the Christian message more effectively. Many of them were very poor. They paid their own way to the school, but once there they were housed and fed by the Billy Graham team on the campus of the Moscow State University. It was the first such training program in Soviet history. While the Russian Orthodox Church did not officially participate, a number of their people at-tended. Billy Graham told the preachers from every denomination in that part of the world that now is the time to do God’s work. He said the school was taking advantage of the new openness that has come to Eastern Europe.

You already have or soon will be a recipient of the brochure “One Nation Under God,” which is being mailed to every home in America, 102 million, which is the largest single non-government mailing in the history of the postal service. This ambitious project, which is likely to cost $10 million, is sponsored by the Sycamore Church of Christ in Cookeville, Tn., with thousands of congregations assisting. By mid-summer there had already been 80,000 responses to the mailing. The brochure is an eight-page, full-color, cartoon-like presentation on Jesus Christ as the answer to the ills of modem society. It is nothing less than amazing that our people can do a project of this magnitude without any centralized government.

Mainline churches have a way of shooting themselves in the foot over the issue of homosexuality. First it was the Presbyterians who brought the recommendation for a new sexual ethic, which included approval of same-gender sex, all the way to the General Assembly for a vote. While it was overwhelmingly voted down, it left the denomination bruised and battered by the ordeal. Now it is the Disciples of Christ in the throes of controversy over the issue, sparked by the fact that their nominee for the new general minister has acknowledged membership in and approval of GLAD, a gay-lesbian support organization among the Disciples. Like the Presbyterian study committee that called for a new sexual ethic, Dr. Michael Kinnamon, the nominee to be the next general minister, believes that since gays-lesbians do not choose their sexual orientation, the church can accept homosexuality as God-approved. The Disciple, an official publication for the denomination, is to be commended for publishing essays on both sides of the issue. But it is evident that the church catholic is not going to accept the thesis that same-gender sex is according to the will of God, and churches are making a mistake when they press the issue. It is one thing to show love and acceptance toward homosexuals, which we should all support, but it is another thing to say that homosexual behavior is ordained of God. Neither is the church at large going to be indifferent to what it has always understood the Bible to teach on the subject. But injured feet or not, both the Disciples and the Presbyterians are going to be OK, and we wish for them an effective ministry for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.