Page 4436 – Christianity Today (2024)

As bombs exploded around Pristina, Kosovo, in NATO’s largest military action since its inception, Anton Krasniqi, who pastors the first Albanian Pentecostal church in Pristina, his wife, and two children spent five harrowing nights hiding in their home.

“We could see Serbian policemen breaking into shops and houses around our home in the center, looting and destroying,” Krasniqi told CT. “We could not sleep for fear that they would come to get us as well.”

NATO’s air campaign against Serbia began March 24 after Serbia rejected peace initiatives that would have stationed NATO troops in the Kosovo province to deter the ethnic cleansing of its 1.8 million people who are mostly ethnic Albanians and Muslim. But after the bombing started, Serbian police and soldiers forced more than 500,000 people from the country. An estimated additional 400,000 have fled their Kosovo homes but remain within the province’s borders in an area that long has been deeply divided by religion and nationalism (CT, Feb. 8, 1999, p. 60).

“I do not think that we will ever be able to live together with the Serbs again,” Krasniqi says. “NATO must finish the job now. My people do not flee because of NATO bombs, but because of the Serbian forces killing and looting.”

In Kosovo, there are fewer than 300 evangelicals in about seven churches, the largest of which has 60 members. The Krasniqi family escaped to an evangelical church in Skopje, Macedonia, before Easter. A neighbor who is a Pristina customs officer drove them to safety through Serbian checkpoints. Kraniqi hopes his family will be allowed to travel to Germany, where his sister lives. But for the moment, he says, “We are in shock. The five nights we stayed in Pristina after the bombing started were like hell to us.”

CUSHION OF LOVE: During the 1990s, a missions success story has been unfolding in neighboring Albania, a country emerging from communist rule, atheism, and most recently, in 1997, a nationwide investment scam that crippled the economy. Prior to 1991, Albania had no missions personnel from any overseas Christian organization, and all religious practices were illegal. Today, there are more than 130 Protestant missions staff in the country. And the number of Trinitarian churches nationwide has grown to about 900 today.

As the NATO air campaign began, 350,000 Kosovo refugees were forced from their homes and across the Albanian border, overwhelming the Albanian government, churches, and their overseas partners.

In Lushnje, a city of 40,000 south of Tirane, the Albanian capital, believers from six churches gather in a morning prayer circle every day. Mornings, they assess needs. Afternoons, they deliver goods and services. Evenings, they search shortwave radio for the latest news or post e-mail updates on the Internet. At first, the refugees were housed with Albanian families, but now many are in tent camps.

In addition to distributing food, blankets, and medical care, Albanian Christians have distributed 20,000 copies of When Your Whole World Changes, a Scripture-based booklet on coping with disaster, produced by the International Bible Society.

Classes were suspended at the Albanian Bible Institute, founded by several evangelical missions, in the coastal city of Durres. They converted a warehouse into a refugee center for hot meals, shelter, and sanitary facilities.

In Tirane itself, Albanian Christians are manning a refugee transit center at an indoor sports stadium. Other churches are focusing on ministering at Tirane’s tent cities. “The Albanian government is stunned by what the churches are able to do,” says Clive Calver, president of World Relief. “We’ve got to get behind the church now so they can build a hope, build a future for these people.”

Peter Kuzmic, head of the Evan gel i cal Seminary in Osijek, Croatia, and perhaps the best-known evangelical in the Balkans, has formed, in partnership with other Balkan churches and Agape International, the Cushion of Love campaign to assist refugees throughout the region.

Kuzmic told CT, “We are uniquely equipped by the Lord to be instrumental in reconciliation, and we must develop a neutrality of engagement. We will not have fulfilled our mission if we just send money, food, and clothing.”

Kuzmic has met with Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic twice and believes churches internationally need to speak out with “more prophetic courage.”

“We need to point the finger and say there is an aggressor and there are victims.” Kuzmic agrees that there are guilty parties on both sides of the Kosovo conflict. But he notes, “All are sinful, but not all are guilty of the same crimes.”

SERBIAN CHURCH RESPONSE: Serbian evangelicals face the difficulty of speaking out against the NATO bombing while seeking a peaceful means to minister during the crisis.

Lazar Stojsic, president of the Serbian Evangelical Alliance, says Belgrade evangelicals gather nightly in homes for prayer. Fearing for the safety of its relief workers, Belgrade’s Bread of Life outreach program has suspended aid deliveries.

Serbian Orthodox bishop Ireney said, “The difficulties in Kosovo are a thousand times greater after the NATO intervention.” Serbian Bishop Artemije of Ras-Prizren is a member of a democracy movement within Serbia that favors human rights for all peoples in the Balkans. He said that movement has been gravely set back. In an open letter to NATO leaders, Artemije said, “Our hopes in you, your democracy, your love of justice, your humanitarianism, are now buried deep in craters produced by your bombs.”

From Leskovac, Serbia, Miodrag Stankovic, a Pentecostal pastor, says his church opened its bomb shelter to believers and nonbelievers alike. “We Christians see it as our duty to stand up in the gap between the nations of our land.” Church members are fasting and praying around the clock. Stankovic says that the bombing brought to mind a Serbian saying, “Work as if you would live a hundred years; pray as if you would die tonight.”

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American pro-life groups, often associated with anti-abortion protests and crisis-pregnancy counseling, are intensifying their campaign against the use of human embryos in medical research.

In January, the Clinton administration began to form guidelines for federal funding of medical research that uses cells from discarded human embryos. The supply of excess embryos mostly comes from fertility clinics. In such research, the embryo is dissected and its stem cells cultivated. Stem cells develop into many varieties of human tissue. They are a critical component in the emerging field of regenerative medicine, which aims to use human cells to repair bone and tissue.

In 1995, Congress banned any re search on human embryos, but scientists tapped private funds for research using aborted fetuses or with embryos donated by parents. Under proposed new guidelines, federal funds could be used to finance research on stem cells. Yet the federal money could not pay for isolating and developing the embryonic stem cells, which currently requires destroying a human embryo. Opponents strongly object to such guidelines, saying they evade the congressional ban on embryo research and that the proposed research depends on destroying human life.

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE: The goal for stem-cell research is to develop specialized cells, which could be transplanted into patients. For example, people with Parkinson’s disease have lost cells that produce dopamine, needed for normal functioning of the central nervous system. Future treatments may include restoring dopamine-producing cells to Parkinson’s patients.

In a major medical breakthrough, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin last November announced that he had isolated a line of stem cells using human embryos from the hospital fertility clinic. Although public money did not figure in the Wisconsin research, the matter sparked a congressional subcommittee hearing in December about whether the 1995 ban on public financing of research using live human embryos should be dropped.

Pro-life advocacy groups such as the National Right to Life Committee op pose the use of live human embryos in research. The pro-life organizations are not opposed to the possibility of stem-cell research. But they urge re searchers to use stem cells obtained from umbilical cords or adults. Researchers are making progress in isolating stem-cells from adults, but it is proving to be difficult and costly.

NO LEGAL STANDING: In the United States, embryos kept alive outside the uterus have no independent legal status, and thus their fate remains in limbo.

But Nigel Cameron, professor of theology and culture and senior vice president at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, is skeptical of widely publicized claims that embryonic stem cell research must be allowed because it may generate cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease. The research “can go in ten different directions or nowhere,” he says.

Cameron is also concerned that the researchers will push the envelope by keeping the embryos alive and growing as long as possible for additional experimentation. “Plainly, once it is possible to maintain embryos in vitro for longer periods, there will of course be immense scientific interest in doing so because of the research possibilities.”

The debate over research using embryonic stem cells is heavily influenced by the politics of abortion.

The logic of the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court means that many advocacy groups oppose protection for embryos outside the womb in principle, in case it impacts the right to abortion.

In most of Europe, by contrast, embryos outside the womb are not viewed as persons. But the Council of Europe’s bio ethics treaty protects embryos from nonbeneficial research.

BIOTECH REVOLUTION: Efforts to restrain research on human embryos faces not only the abortion-rights lobby, but also the biotech industry and health charities that hope stem-cell research will lead to historic advances against crippling diseases.

Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World (Putnam Publishing, 1998), predicts that scientific advances in human biology will force liberals and conservatives to rethink their positions on long-standing quarrels. Rifkin believes their common enemy will be a commercial eugenics industry in which both parents and society aim to weed out unhealthy or unwanted genes from humanity.

In 1995, Rifkin mobilized a broad array of liberal and conservative religious leaders to oppose corporate patents on life forms. The coalition was unsuccessful because the biotech lobby proved stronger and won the right to patent life, creating the possibility of patenting as well as manipulating human cellular tissue.

In the United States, legal protection against being patented begins at “birth,” which would be precluded for human entities kept alive outside the womb.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, commented recently on the issue. “Human cells, tissues, and organs should not be commodities to be bought and sold in a biotech slave market,” Land said. “Some researchers have established in their own minds an arbitrary lesser moral status for human beings in their embryonic stage of development.”

The Clinton administration’s draft guidelines are meeting some resistance in Congress with 57 representatives going on record against them.

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Leaders of evangelical, Southern Baptist, and Roman Catholic groups are declaring victory in the latest skirmish of an ongoing battle against entertainment giant Disney, Inc.

In April, brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, whose Miramax Films unit counts Disney as a major investor, said they would pay the media conglomerate $12 million for Disney’s share of the controversial new film Dogma. They will set up a separate company to distribute the movie. Disney officials refused repeated requests from CT to comment on the move. How ever, critics of the company believe the new film far exceeds Disney’s tolerance for controversial subjects.

According to media reports, Dogma, written and directed by Roman Catholic Kevin Smith, stars Academy Award–winners Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as angels seeking a return to heaven after being banished. The film also stars Chris Rock as a trash-talking thirteenth apostle. Plot elements include a female descendant of Joseph and Mary who works in an abortion facility; a Skeeball-obsessed God, played by rock singer Alanis Morissette; and a Christ figure giving a thumbs-up salute instead of suffering during crucifixion.

Smith, 32, burst upon the Hollywood scene in 1994 with the hugely profitable and vulgar Clerks, a movie produced for $27,000 about denizens of a convenience store. He received critical and commercial acclaim by the time of his third movie, Chasing Amy—about a man who falls in love with a lesbian—in 1997.

CROSSING THE LINE? The blasphemies suggested in Dogma are too much for critics such as Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in Nashville and William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in New York City. Smith contends the movie is “intended as a love letter to both faith and God Almighty.”

“This film sounds more like hate mail than a love letter,” says Donohue, who notes that actor Affleck declared that the content is “meant to push buttons.”

Donahue says the Catholic League has a few buttons of its own to push, vowing a protest against whatever company distributes the film: “In 1995, we dealt successfully with the Miramax movie Priest (CT, May 15, 1995, p. 52), and just last year we crushed the Disney/ABC show Nothing Sacred (CT, Oct. 6, 1997, p. 84). Now we’ll tackle Dogma.”

But Land drew some encouragement from the Disney move. “Disney seems to have heightened sensitivity to the feelings of Christians,” which Land thinks is due to the boycott.

The question of whether boycotts are effective comes four years after the initial protests by the Catholic League and the American Family Association. The SBC became involved with a vote to join the boycott at its 1997 convention (CT, July 14, 1997, p. 72). Other de nominations and parachurch ministries also have joined the effort (CT, Oct. 6, 1997, p. 84).

The groups are upset not only over anti-Christian messages in Disney-backed entertainment, but also over “cooperation” with sponsors of “Gay Day” festivities at Disney theme parks and the provision of “domestic partner benefits” to hom*osexual couples when one of them is employed by Disney.

EARNINGS NOT IMPACTED: Calling the Disney boycott an overall success, however, has been hotly debated in and around evangelical circles. According to some critics, the fact that Disney’s profits and revenues remained stagnant in 1998 at $1.85 billion indicates a measure of success. Indeed, in the firm’s annual report, Disney chair Michael Eisner told shareholders, “This flat performance probably doesn’t come as a surprise.” Disney did post a record 20 percent increase in revenues in 1997.

Film critic and author Michael Medved believes that Disney’s apparent move on Dogma stems not from too much participation in the boycott, but too little.

“The fact that Disney was afraid of this film is not a sign that they took the boycott too seriously, but that they took it not seriously at all,” Medved says. “Right now, there are not a lot of people participating [in the boycott], and Disney didn’t want a new round of interest.”

Protests should focus on individual films and not the whole company, Medved believes. “The entire boycott is misconceived.” He suggests concerned constituencies teach accountability, restraint, and responsibility in media consumption. “Just as it’s important for our kids not to get involved in drugs and alcohol and premarital sex, it’s important not to get them addicted to degrading entertainment.”

At the same time, Ted Baehr, publisher of Movieguide, a review magazine aimed at Christian families, notes that some Disney units still offer positive products families can enjoy. His publication selected the Disney-produced Simon Birch as the best movie of 1998.

“Last year, when we were looking at films for our Ephiphany prize, Disney had several with explicit Christian content,” Baehr says. “We have to remember that there are those people at Disney doing work with a lot of Christian content.”

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Three firebomb attacks within two weeks in March highlighted growing pressure on the Christian and Messianic Jewish communities in Israel.

On March 7, Mikhail and Tirtze Shvaneberg’s parked car was firebombed outside their home in Moshava Migdal, a community of 2,500 near the Sea of Galilee. The Shvanebergs and their eight children are members of the Peniel Messianic Jewish congregation in Tiberias.

Flames spread to the home’s balcony in the 3:30 a.m. fire. The eldest daughter, Hadassah, heard windows breaking. “I called everyone and we extinguished the fire. It’s a miracle from God that the house didn’t burn down.”

The Shvanebergs had been threatened in the past for openly sharing their faith that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

Eight days after the car fire, two Molotov co*cktails were thrown into the Baptist Book Shop in west Jerusalem, also during early morning, causing several thousand dollars’ worth of damage.

Six days later, Joseph Shulam, an early Israeli Messianic leader and head of the Netivyah Bible Instruction Min is try, was awakened in his Jerusalem home at 3:45 a.m. by a Molotov co*cktail. “I opened the window and took the burning bottle to the sink and drowned it in a pot full of water,” Shulam says.

Israeli police have made no arrests in connection with the three attacks, but they did apprehend three ultraorthodox Jews after an assault last November. Hundreds of black-garbed Jews in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem ransacked and burned the contents of an apartment occupied by three Swiss Christian women accused of “missionary activity.” In February, a court sentenced 28-year-old Yehoshua Weiss to eight months in prison for his part in the attack.

ORGANIZED CAMPAIGN? In Beersheva, however, religious institutions supported by the Israeli government itself have been campaigning against the city’s mixed congregation of Christians and Messianic Jews.

Last November, hundreds of ultra-orthodox surrounded the congregation’s meeting place on a Saturday morning after rumors circulated in local synagogues that Jewish children had been kidnapped and were to be baptized that morning. Congregants were trapped inside and had to be escorted to safety between police lines, which held back the spitting and cursing crowd.

A month later, Beersheva’s newly installed Sephardic chief rabbi, Yehuda Deri, addressed an emergency rally of hundreds of Jews from the Negev region to oppose the congregation of “missionaries,” characterized as “sons of Satan” in a film shown to the gathering. “We will fight the mission until the last drop of our blood,” declared Deri.

Rabbi Jeremy Calife, an employee in Deri’s government-financed office who helped organize the rally, made repeated visits to the workplace of a Christian member of the congregation and at tempted to have him fired. Calife told CT he made the visits on his own time as a “volunteer for the Jewish people.”

Handbills were also posted outside the apartments of other congregants warning neighbors to stay away from the “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and inviting residents to file complaints with the police. The notices were signed by the Heart for the Brothers organization, which, according to documents on file with the Israeli Interior Ministry, has made application for substantial government funding.

LEGISLATIVE PROPOSALS: Efforts have also been made in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to restrict evangelization. Last year, a bill that would have imposed a maximum prison term of three years and a $12,500 fine for “anyone who preaches with the goal of causing any other person to change his religion” passed an initial reading (CT, May 18, 1998, p. 22).

Rabbi Raphael Pinchasi, the Knesset member who sponsored that bill, is not seeking office in this month’s Israeli elections, according to Paul Liberman, copastor of the Beit Asaph Messianic congregation in Netanya. “The bill will go into retirement with him,” Liberman says. “Then the religious parties will introduce new legislation.”

Liberman, chair of the Messianic Action Committee set up by Israeli congregations to oppose legislation restricting religious liberty, has been monitoring reports about Messianic Jews that appear in ultraorthodox publications in Israel. “You almost understand why the firebombing takes place,” he says. “The lies about us are rampant: kidnappings, bribing people to convert with food, all sorts of extreme slanders are stoking the fires to produce this violence.”

Liberman compares the situation to that of Jews in the Middle Ages, when false reports that Jews kidnapped Christian children to use their blood in religious ceremonies were repeated so often that the Christian majority believed them to be true.

“When something is stated by rabbis [about Messianic Jews] without corroborating evidence, they’re assumed to be truth tellers, while we’re thought to be unethical soul stealers without credibility,” Liberman says.

The only recourse for Christians in Israel may be to follow the counsel of Mikhail Shvaneberg after attackers firebombed his car and home. “Simply bless them and pray that God will open their eyes,” he says. “They want to serve God but don’t know how. It’s the same situation as Paul in the New Testament—he pursued the believers because he believed he was doing something good for God.”

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During his church trial for defying the United Methodist Church’s official ban on blessing same-sex unions, the Reverend Gregory Dell told the jury that if they were to remove him, they would set in motion “the dynamic of denominational cleansing.”

Apparently, cleansing has replaced witch hunt, McCarthyism, and Inquisition as a term of opprobrium for those with whom one disagrees. But associating the church court’s guilty verdict with a horrifying allusion to the racist ethnic cleansings of our decade is not merely over-the-top rhetoric or a clever, made-for-the-media soundbite. It is serious misrepresentation of what is happening in the United Methodist Church.

First, denominational cleansing misrepresents what happened in Dell’s own case: Dell was not the victim of a McCarthyesqe purge mounted by the denomination’s conservative activists. After the UMC’s highest judicial body had made it clear that the denomination’s ban on blessing same-sex unions had the force of church law, Dell created a test case, and his own bishop, a liberal who publicly agreed with Dell’s stance, filed the charges against him. The trial was entirely Dell’s doing.

Second, it misrepresents the realistic and restrained mood among the UMC’s conservatives. As CT reported in its April 26, 1999, issue (p. 16), while Dell’s supporters demonstrated outside the trial venue, conservatives chose not to mount any organized counterdemonstration because “it would only fan divisiveness and be seen as a personal attack on a brother in Christ.” Similarly, conservatives have avoided triumphalist comments following Dell’s suspension, but have spoken realistically about the debate that lies ahead. “This restraint is a sign that conservative forces … know how fragile the connection is at this point, and they want to do everything they can to preserve that connection,” said Maxie Dunnam, president of Asbury Theological Seminary, in an interview with CT.

Third, to call church discipline “denominational cleansing” is to misunderstand the purpose of disciplinary action in the Wesleyan tradition—and in the biblical vision of the church as well. Discipline, as the word’s root shows, is about making disciples. And when disciples wander, discipline is about bringing them back. The Wesleyan tradition had such discipline at its core from its eighteenth-century beginnings when John Wesley structured his movement around small, disciple-making, mutual accountability groups.

Thus Dunnam told CT, “Our Wesleyan position on holiness addresses the issue of how we live together in community and hold each other responsible in our ethical and moral lives.” The Dell trial, he points out, “is part of a normal process that we have not practiced enough because [in recent years] we have bent over backwards … to be fair and respect people’s consciences.”

This disciple-making approach to discipline is reflected in the penalty placed on Dell: he is suspended from active ministry until he promises not to violate the ban on blessing same-sex unions—or until the church’s policy changes. Dell was not defrocked or disfellowshiped. Instead, he was told he could function again as a United Methodist minister when he would function as a United Methodist minister. That is hardly, as the Christian Century‘s Jim Wall wrote, “a moralistic bludgeon not unlike the one wielded by Martin Luther’s tormentors . …”

How wide the divide?If UMC conservatives are not an army of inquisitors wistful for the era of the rack and the thumbscrew, what is going on in the UMC? For some, the issue of blessing same-sex unions is a matter of justice, making available to gays and lesbians the same kind of support the church gives to heterosexual couples. Viewing it as a matter of supporting “fidelity” wherever it is found, liberal Methodists have compared the current issue to earlier struggles in the church over racial and gender issues. But the issue is certainly not merely one of an anachronistic and oppressive church slow to catch up with society on this issue.

The issue of same-sex unions is “only symptomatic of a different theological mindset that exists within the denomination,” said the Reverend Phil Granger, chair of the Good News board of directors and district superintendent in Kokomo, Indiana. The deeper divide in the UMC is about how we know what God wants to tell us creatures about what is best for us. “We don’t have the same understanding of revelation, we don’t have the same understanding of biblical authority,” says Dunnam. Much theology today is not derived from biblical revelation, but from reflection on human experience. “We are a divided church theologically,” Dunnam says, “and as a result, we are not able to deal very well with issues like the practice of hom*osexuality.”

This divide is to some degree the result of Methodism’s own theology: unlike the sixteenth-century Reformers who shouted, Sola scriptura!, Wesley and his followers lived in the Age of Reason. Wesley believed that theology needed to take into account not only Scripture and tradition, but reason and experience as well. Scripture was, for Wesley, the norm that judged all other norms. But Wesley’s heirs have often let their reading of human experience trump Scripture.

This theological divide is not easily understood by the mainstream media. Much journalism is devoted to telling stories of oppression: oppression by corrupt city halls, oppression by sweatshop owners, and oppression by resurgent Islamic fundamentalism. Journalism in a therapeutic culture is also often about victimhood. It is easy for the chroniclers of our times to cast any story about a group that stands firm for what it believes as a story about an oppressive institution that won’t let people be true to themselves.

Gregory Dell’s own career is in many ways a commendable history of fighting oppression and putting himself on the line for other people’s liberation. According to Scott Field, the Northern Illinois director of Good News, “If there’s a barbed-wire fence, Greg will throw himself on it.” Dell sees the ban on same-sex unions as an injustice, and consistent with his history, he has charged into the barbed wire.

Our culture’s way of framing these discussions places a tremendous burden on conservative forces, such as United Methodism’s Good News and Confessing Movements, to communicate clearly their concern for truth, for institutional integrity, and for genuine pastoral concern. Genuine pastoral concern always works to save people from their sins rather than merely to help them feel strangely warmed by appropriate empathy and misguided affirmation.

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Christianity Today and long-term reader, “that odd day between the devastating sorrow of Good Friday and the exhilarating joy of Easter,” and he had spent much of the day reflecting on the refugees from Kosovo. “Their plight seems much like this day.”

But Gorman was distressed by more than the refugees’ plight: He was distressed by remarks made by the heads of two well-known evangelical relief organizations. And so he should be.

“Early on in the NATO military campaign, one of these leaders appeared on cable TV. He not only spoke of the horrific conditions in Kosovo and the refugees’ experience, but also urged viewers to pray for the success of our military personnel. While I understand the logic behind such a request (‘military success will stop the killing in Kosovo and allow refugees to return home without fear’), it troubles me deeply.

We give as Christians to a Christian ministry, not as Americans to an Americanorganization.

“More troubling still were comments from a different evangelical agency head, when he and colleagues from other religious humanitarian agencies emerged from a White House meeting about their agencies’ role in the Balkans. Acting as an unofficial spokesperson for the group, he informed a national audience that he had told the White House that their agencies represented the American people, and that they supported the U.S. and NATO military action.”

Gorman says he reacted immediately: “‘You do not represent the American people but the Christian church!’ My wife and I have given to this agency for nearly a quarter of a century, and when we do, we give as Christians to a Christian ministry, not as Americans to an American organization. Especially in time of war, that distinction is absolutely crucial.”

Gorman, an evangelical United Methodist and dean of the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at Saint Mary’s Seminary & University in Baltimore, continues: “I appreciate the difficulty that Christian agencies face constantly, but particularly during military action, in having to work closely with governments, including the governments of the nations in which they are based. Still, there is no reason for Christian humanitarian agencies to choose sides.

“Except for one side—the pierced side of Christ, the side of the victims of war and terrorism and evil in all its despicable forms. This is the side we should choose, this is the place to stand, on Holy Saturday and on every other day.

“Before long, I suspect, this will mean standing not only with Muslim Kosovars in countries like Albania, but also with Christian Serbs in places like Belgrade. If we have chosen one side now, how will we, in good conscience, be prepared to choose rightly then?”

We agree. Relief agencies need to be neutral so that they can have the greatest possible access to those in need—no matter what side of the border victims are on. Most relief agencies realize that when they become partisan, doors shut to those needing help. Christian relief agencies have a special calling to avoid any adversarial stance and to be repairers of the breach—and thus to model Christ’s countercultural way for all believers.

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Sunday morning in New York’s Chinatown, a group of elderly Chinese men gathers at Lucky China Bakery to wait for the buses to Atlantic City. Mostly hardened gamblers, they have seen their money come and go across the gaming tables of Trump Castle, the Hilton, and other casinos. Today, they gather around fearful looking 62-year-old Mr. Eng.

“It makes me sick,” a friend tells him. “If you have lost your family money, you shouldn’t get on the bus!” But Eng nervously looks at the clock; only 20 minutes until he boards the chartered bus with his dream of recovering his life savings.

Chinatown, in southern Manhattan, has a panoply of gambling options, including a state-run off-track betting parlor, state lotteries, illegal gambling dens, bookies, and innumerable mahjong games. Yet the biggest portion of gambling money flows out of China town into the coffers of Atlantic City casinos.

After the two-hour bus ride, the Chinatown elderly quickly scatter to spend six hours at Trump Plaza Casino, which provides $25 in coins as a reward for those who have paid the $15 bus fare. The seniors enter a self-contained fantasy world of glittering lights, mirrored columns, and crystal chandeliers. The buzzers, bells, flashing lights, and clanging of tokens dropping into slot machine trays can be mesmerizing in an environment with no windows or clocks.

On this Sunday, 47 buses are bound for the New Jersey city that legalized casinos in 1976. About 9 million people a year are brought to Atlantic City by casino buses, and Sunday is their busiest day of the week.

HOW TO HOOK A SENIOR: According to John Eades, 57, author of a new recovery book, Gambling Addiction: The Problem, the Pain, and the Pathway to Recovery (Thistle Press), increased gambling among the elderly comes at a huge cost to themselves, their families, and churches. “As older persons become addicted, they use Sunday as a gambling day, not a church day. Once they’re hooked, they’re ashamed to come back to church. They need to have a spiritual transformation to change.”

Compulsive gambling causes people who have no past criminal behavior to suddenly write bad checks or steal money from relatives. Out-of-control bettors lose their jobs, gamble away cars and homes, file for bankruptcy, divorce, go to prison, or kill themselves—all because the addiction becomes paramount in their lives.

Gambling enterprises make it easy and affordable for elders to bet. Casinos commission tour companies to arrange low-cost trips to gather senior citizens from specified sites and bus them to the site.

“These trips are sponsored by everybody: church groups, banks, senior centers, retirement centers,” says Dennis P. McNeilly, a 45-year-old Jesuit priest who is a psychologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.

Pat Fowler, 52, executive director of the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling in Orlando, asks, “Who else will pick you up at your home, take you to engage in an exciting activity in a safe environment, give you lunch, call you by your name, and make you feel important? Our society sees seniors primarily as disposable, and this industry has picked up on that.”

Ron Pavalko, 64, director of the Center for Gambling Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, says, “The buses are really mobile senior citizen centers.

“They are extremely social places,” Pavalko says. “Riders talk about their grand children, the future of social security, Medicare costs. But they also talk about gambling: who’s got the loosest slots, the best buffet, or the friendliest staff.”

McNeilly, who researches gambling among older adults, notes that one riverboat casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa, gives older adult Slot Club members a 50 percent discount on prescription drugs. “Another local casino recently had former stars of the Lawrence Welk Show for entertainment,” McNeilly says. “Who’s going to go see Myron Floren except those 65 and older?”

Using data from his research of 81 Omaha-area senior centers and retirement homes, McNeilly discovered that bingo is their top recreational undertaking—followed by trips to casinos.

“When transportation is involved, the most popular social activity is going to casinos,” he says. “It beat out going out to lunch and day shopping trips. Transportation is a key factor for this age group.”

Casinos have also successfully re moved the stigma that many seniors once associated with gambling by making it a socially acceptable outing. For instance, in Kansas City, Missouri, Station Casino is anchored by a 200-room hotel on one end and an 18-theater cinemaplex on the other. The casino is in the middle of an indoor mall that includes six restaurants and an in- door playground in which to drop off the kids—or grandkids. A 1,381-seat pavilion is the site of boxing matches and concerts.

Station Casino offers a “Golden Opportunities Club” to those 55 and older, featuring discounts on shows and buffets. Different daily benefits include free valet parking on Mondays and free coffee on Wednesdays.

But it has been Harrah’s—the biggest chain in the nation with 18 casinos—that has turned marketing to seniors into an art form. Harrah’s became an early leader in asking players to provide personal information garnered from driver’s licenses in order to receive a free automatic teller-like card used to gamble. The cards are inserted into slot machines to keep track of wins and losses. By accumulating time, players can qualify for cash rebates, a discounted motel room, or a free show. And by tracking the activity, Harrah’s knows how best to market its direct-mail promotions to attract the elderly.

Marketing methods: Gamblers at Station
Casino and other chains allow the house
to count their losses via a free tellerlike
card in an effort to earn discounts on
meals, shows, and hotel stays.

Richard J. Klemp, 49, director of government affairs for Harrah’s corporate office in Memphis, says it is good business sense to offer incentives to senior citizens. Some seniors, due to physical limitations, cannot handle strenuous activity, Klemp told CT. “Casino gambling for some is their activity of choice.”

Harrah’s casino in North Kansas City, Missouri, with two adjacent riverboats containing 2,176 slot machines and 75 table games, is open from 8 a.m. to 5 a.m. most days. But the morning and early afternoon hours are not the do main of high rollers as much as white-haired ladies, many playing the nickel slots. Keeping the elderly from being lured to other area casinos is imperative. To sweeten the pot, senior citizens at Harrah’s receive “preferred boarding” and double gold card points on Mondays and Thursdays. For a generation that lived through the Great Depression, bargains are always appreciated. Industry figures show the largest category of Missouri gamblers, 36 percent, is those ages 51–65.

HIGH PRICE OF ADDICTION: The elderly are particularly vulnerable to becoming hooked on gambling, according to research.

McNeilly says his geriatric outpatient clinic in Omaha had no gambling addiction patients during its first decade. How ever, in the past two years—after two casinos and a dog track with a casino opened across the Missouri River in Council Bluffs—the clinic has treated 50 cases.

“This age group has seen gambling change in our society from something considered a sin or a vice to mainstream entertainment and socially acceptable,” McNeilly says. “Those who grew up during the Depression have been very frugal; they’ve saved all their lives, sacrificed, put other people’s needs before their own, and now they’re at a time when they have more disposable time and income than they ever had. Gambling is an opportunity to take risks that they’ve never taken.”

Around 60 percent of older adults who bet are “casual social gamblers,” McNeilly says. These people go to a casino infrequently with a predetermined amount, and once they spend it they quit. Nationally, compulsive gamblers account for 1–3 percent of those ages 65 and older, McNeilly says, but in areas with casinos that rises to 2–6 percent.

McNeilly says an increasing number of elderly, especially women, are “relief-escape” gamblers, a stage that has not progressed to addiction but could. “This is a group that essentially uses gambling as a means to relieve boredom, loneliness, isolation, depression,” he says.

Several recent studies confirm that more senior citizens are gambling, and losing control. For instance:

»A February University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center (NORC) nationwide study of 2,400 adults com paring data between now and 1974 shows the highest increase among gamblers has been among those 65 and older.

»Research conducted by Linda Bradley of 235 gambling senior citizens from Westerly, Rhode Island, shows that the third and the fourth are the busiest days of the month at casinos, as retirement checks arrive in the mail. More than half who gambled had an annual income of less than $20,000; 31 percent gambled with money from pensions, 20 percent from social security.

»“We found a disproportionate number of gamblers are elderly,” says J. Terrence Brunner, 61, executive director of the watchdog Chicago-based Better Government Association. “Of that group, women tend to play the slots and veg-out, sometimes for hours.”

»Valerie Lorenz, 62, whose Compulsive Gambling Center in Baltimore is connected with the longest-running residential treatment program for pathological gamblers in the country, says more elderly married couples are becoming addicted. “We’re seeing more husbands and wives addicted, first one and then the other, invariably on slots.”

»Technological developments could result in more elderly addicts. Since 1995, Internet users have been able to gamble on interactive Web sites. About 140 unregulated sites exist, based primarily in the Caribbean. In a few years, though it faces legislative challenges from the casino industry fearful of losing business, shut-ins could gamble via their television sets.

»Recovering addict Eades says senior centers are unwittingly sending more and more undiagnosed Alzheimer’s patients to gamble. “You don’t have to function at a high level to play slot machines.”

QUICK DOWNFALL? Eades, who is now a certified gambling-addiction treatment psychologist in the geriatric unit of Southern Tennessee Medical Center in Winchester, filed bankruptcy after racking up $245,000 in credit card gambling debts. His weekly wages are garnisheed. “I’ll never be able to retire.”

Ironically, Eades worked with the chemically addicted for two decades before becoming a compulsive gambler when he went to a casino for the first time with some friends. Many trips to casino ATMs followed that first visit to a slot machine. Roughly half the money wagered in casinos is not carried onto the premises, but rather is extracted electronically once there.

While there are similarities with alcoholism, gambling may be the addiction with the greatest potential for rapid destruction. Unlike alcoholism, the object of obsession is money. In a matter of hours, gamblers can ruin themselves economically. And dissimilar to alcoholism, the problem gambler often resorts to illegal means to satisfy the craving.

Fowler has been tracking senior gambling for seven years since the Florida Council implemented a 24-hour phone help line. She discovered the elderly—who already are the highest-risk age group for suicide—have unique circ*mstances when it comes to gambling. They are often dealing with major life changes, such as retirement, death of a spouse, or early dementia. “It’s the only thing that relieves the pain of whatever loss they’re dealing with, be it the identification of job and profession, loss of a spouse, loss of their good health, loss of their beauty,” she says.

According to Fowler, even those who have gambled socially for years are more at risk of becoming problem gamblers in retirement because they have more time to gamble (see “Charity Bingo’s Road to Ruin,” below).

She says seniors are also at high risk because, unlike teenagers, it is assumed that they have the experience to prevent them from losing control. But many of the elderly are gambling for the first time and have no idea how easily it can be come an addiction.

The aged infirm do not have the practical option of filing for bankruptcy. “When they have spent or lost all of their retirement because they’ve become addicted to gambling or lost control over gambling, they can’t go out and start over and rebuild,” Fowler says. “Their options are very limited.”

One recourse is to move in with an adult child. “For most seniors, that is the greatest fear in life: becoming reliant on kids in old age,” Fowler says. Second, they can become a part of the social system that picks up the costs, but few want to do that. “For many, that is not an option because they’re people who have been extremely productive and resourceful throughout their lives. They worked very hard.”

MORE FUN THAN CHURCH? Many churchgoing retirees find time enough in their schedules for day-tripping to casinos as well as Sunday worship services. Twice a month, widows Gladys Zink, 68, and Faye Norman, 65, drive to Harrah’s in North Kansas City, 60 miles west from their homes in Knob Noster, Missouri. “We just come because we don’t have anything to do,” Zink says. “We’re good people. We just do it for fun.” The women figure that with their homes paid off and no family in the immediate area, a casino trip makes for an entertaining outing.

“It’s not habit forming,” Norman says. “We set a limit when we come, and then we quit and go home.” The women, who both attend the Christian Church in Knob Noster every week, also go to gamble in Las Vegas once a year.

Harrah’s employees are as friendly as any church greeter. Free popcorn is dispensed in the lobby. Free soft drinks are available on the riverboats.

Terry Knapp, 61, a retired truck driver, usually gambles twice a month, with a limit of $20. He comes to Kansas City from Atchison, Kansas, 60 miles west, with his wife and a married couple. Part of the draw for him is the all-you-can-eat $1.99 breakfast buffet. Knapp says he began coming to Harrah’s because the employees are much friendlier than the patronizing attitude he encountered at the now-defunct Sam’s Town nearby. “If you’re going to waste your money, you might as well waste it at a place where they like you,” he says.

Irma Murray, 65, a retired Veterans Administration hospital supervisor from Kansas City, knows senior citizens keep casinos running in the daytime. “If we didn’t show up they’d just close the door,” she says.

Murray used to gamble every day. But no more. She is at Harrah’s to pick up a tax statement of losses for 1998, a year in which $5,000 of her money vanished in slots. Murray, a widow, writes checks when she runs out of cash. She uses money from her civil service retirement after tithing to Metropolitan Baptist Church, where she attends Sunday school and church every week.

Lorenz, executive director of the Compulsive Gambling Center in Baltimore, says most seniors prefer slot ma chines, where they can play for lengthy periods without competing against another person. The gaming tables are too intimidating for most novice senior citizen players, especially women, who do not want to be embarrassed trying to learn blackjack or craps, Lorenz says.

To accommodate the rising number of seniors, most slot machines no longer have handles, but merely a button to touch. Customers can feed tokens into machines for hours without tiring.

Day tripper: Morning hours at many Harrah’s
casinos are populated by the elderly.

One of the reasons why more elderly are hooked by gambling is because of its explosive growth. Americans can make a legal wager of some sort in every state except Utah, Hawaii, and Tennessee.

In 42 states, parimutuel betting, including horse and dog races, is legal, although that has been in decline for 15 years as other less skill-oriented forms of risk-taking grew more popular. Lotteries are conducted by 37 states, but new games must constantly be introduced—or existing games repackaged—to keep sales from falling.

The vast acceleration lately has been due to casinos, with 600 operating in 26 states, from economically depressed river towns to isolated Native American reservations.

According to International Gaming and Wagering Business, Americans lost $50.9 billion in legal games in 1997, $27.2 billion of that in casinos and $16.6 billion in lotteries.

Losing pot:U.S. gamblers spent $638.6 billion in legal games in 1997, with $50.9 billion (8 percent) going to the “house.”

Charity Bingo’s Road to RuinChurches may unwittingly be a gambler’s first introduction to organized gaming by sponsoring “fun” and “benign” low-stakes charitable bingo. As casinos have spread nationwide, charitable bingo has faced these new competitors with high-stake games in order to keep its customers coming back. “Now if they step through the doors into high-stakes commercial bingo, it’s an entirely different game,” says elderly gambling expert Pat Fowler. Charitable gambling is legal in 44 states and Americans lost $1.6 billion in such games in 1997. “In any huge bingo parlor—those with 500 customers— 99 percent are 60 years and older,” says compulsive gambling authority Valerie Lorenz. Bingo parlors are trying to compete with the constant “action” of casinos by offering exotic scratch cards and multiple “books.” Midge Baka, 67, of Schiller Park, Illinois, played bingo at her Roman Catholic church west of Chicago for two decades without a problem. But when the church began offering “pull tabs” with the potential to win $500 instantly, she found herself buying 15 bingo cards to play simultaneously—and slowly slipping out of control. She began stealing her husband’s credit cards and lying about her whereabouts, saying she had been shopping or meeting friends when she really was playing bingo every night—at churches, Native American reservations, Veterans of Foreign Wars halls, and bingo parlors. Sometimes, she would spend up to $1,000 a week on bingo and $80 a week on lottery and scratch tickets. Now, Baka has been “clean” for three years, and she reconciled with her husband before he died. “My life was unmanageable,” Baka says. “I realized I was a very sick person when my daughter threatened to never let me see the grandchildren again.” Baka, who is retired, has replaced her gambling outings with camping, movies, dinners with nongambling friends, and, at least four times a week, gambling addicts recovery meetings. Mean while inside her church, bingo still draws a big crowd of elderly gamblers. —JWK

TOO ASHAMED TO SEEK HELP: In March, NORC reported that 5.5 million Americans are pathological or problem gamblers and another 15 million are at risk.

But Harrah’s Klemp maintains that only 0.3 percent of Americans 65 and older have a gambling disorder. Klemp points out that Harrah’s developed a “Bet Smart” program that has been universally adopted in the industry to offer free counseling to addicts through a toll-free help line, which receives only about 900 calls a year. “There are not as many compulsive gamblers as some people like to say,” Klemp states. “It’s certainly less than 1 percent. It’s infinitesimal.”

Yet, the Florida Council’s Fowler says a lack of calls does not translate into a lack of difficulties. “Once their problems have become too overwhelming, they often are too ashamed to seek help.”

Another measure of the size of compulsive gambling among the elderly comes from Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meetings. GA, founded in 1957, is a 12-step self-help, confidential recovery program with nearly 1,350 chapters across the country. It is not explicitly Christian in its approach nor is it solely for the elderly.

Jake P., 69, of Bloomingdale, Illinois, has been attending GA meetings since he quit gambling in 1967, soon after his wife, Mary, tried to kill herself and their three young children by leaving the gas stove on while they took naps. A neighbor smelled the gas and intervened. Mary had become depressed because of mounting debts and a husband obsessed with betting.

Some problem gamblers attend meetings for a few months and figure they have it licked, only to relapse. Jake, who became a Christian soon after he stopped betting, attends GA meetings in three Chicago suburbs each week, even though he has been “clean” for 32 years. “This compulsion took my very soul and made me a slave,” he says. “These meetings saved my life.”

Jake is seen as a spiritual mentor by many younger GA attendees. In addition to staying accountable, Jake believes it is important to go to encourage those whose last bet may have happened last week instead of in the last generation.

About 20 attended a recent GA Saturday-night meeting at Elmhurst Hospital. They are young and old, men and women, executives and blue collar workers, Christians and atheists. One broke elderly participant confesses that he purposely drove away from a convenience store without paying for gas in order to get to the meeting.

The first 20 minutes of every meeting are spent taking turns reading a 17-page GA booklet that tells the signs of compulsive gambling and steps to recovery. Then attendees, identifying themselves by given names and first initial of their surnames, recite a “therapy,” which usually is a testimony recalling how they faltered or how they overcame temptation. Jake sometimes recounts the repeated times he gambled away his annual salary in one night, or how his wife kicked him out of the house seven times. Other members then have an opportunity to respond, and they often do so with profound or poignant advice. Newcomers are assigned a “sponsor,” and members are encouraged to phone each other throughout the week to stay accountable.

Around two dozen visited a recent Tuesday midday meeting at a Catholic church in Schaumburg. A woman in her forties tells how she stole her husband’s disability checks and secretly misappropriated her daughter’s credit cards. But a man in his twenties complains that the therapies being recited are too depressing. A couple of other members quickly respond that such stories must be told over and over, lest people forget how painful it used to be.

But both McNeilly and Fowler say seniors may be better off seeking one-on-one counseling. “This is an age group that is not likely to air their dirty laundry publicly in a support group,” McNeilly says.

No federal funds are allocated to treat compulsive gamblers. While there are 13,000 programs available to substance abusers, there are fewer than 100 for habitual gamblers. And many managed-care plans do not authorize treatment for gambling, Lorenz says.

CHURCH BLIND SPOT? “Gambling is so much a part of the social landscape that we don’t see it anymore,” writes Rex M. Rogers in Seducing America: Is Gambling a Good Bet? (Baker, 1997). “Most Christian groups and churches don’t pay much attention to it.” Rogers, 46, president of Cornerstone University and Grand Rapids (Mich.) Baptist Seminary, says Christians have been oddly silent as gambling has mushroomed.

Harrah’s Klemp does not see a problem. “Casino customers and employees attend church in the same proportions as people who attend symphony concerts, professional baseball games, or any other mainstream activity,” he says.

Ben Skinner, 33, assistant pastor of First Regular Baptist Church in Kansas City, says, “There are real problems in the church, even among the clergy. Many churches have banquets at casinos.” Skinner notes that two inner-city ministers lost their ministries—one who absconded with $50,000 and the other who pawned his congregation’s sound system—because of gambling.

“I know several elderly guys who are on a fixed income and see the casinos as a source for quick cash,” Skinner says. “Every month without fail they take their Social Security checks and go to the riverboats.”

Gambling may contribute to other social ills. In an International Union of Gospel Missions (IUGM) study conducted last year among 1,100 clients at rescue missions, 18 percent cited gambling as a cause of their homelessness.

“Churches don’t consider gambling a primary issue,” says Stephen E. Burger, 58, executive director of IUGM, which has its national headquarters in North Kansas City in the middle of riverboat casino row. “There’s no sense that it has an impact on the rest of us.”

Some Christian leaders believe the church is partly to blame for the mainstreaming of gambling. “The one pillar of society that used to constantly preach against gambling is now running bingo and casino nights,” says Ronald A. Reno, 34, senior research analyst with Focus on the Family. “It’s hard for them to have any kind of moral ground underfoot on which to protest when a casino comes into their town.”

Indeed, Klemp says a lot of church groups gamble, including National Baptists who held their annual convention in Kansas City last year. “Many ministers came; they are very enlightened about gambling,” Klemp says. “About the only church vocally opposed in Missouri is the [United] Methodists.”

The United Methodist Church (UMC) opposition came largely as a result of the efforts of former UMC pastor Tom Grey, 58, executive director of the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling (NCALG). The group waged a successful campaign to stop riverboat casinos in Missouri in April 1994. But a well-financed referendum reversed the vote that November.

Few parachurch groups or denominations have given much thought to gambling beyond passing statements denouncing it. The National Association of Evangelicals in 1966 called gambling “a parasite feeding on both the individual and society.” In 1985, the NAE added that gambling “is socially, morally, and economically destructive” and “a social evil.”

The Assemblies of God, based in Springfield, Missouri, adopted a position paper in 1983 on why gambling is wrong, but no national funds are used to fight gambling and the matter is left to local congregations.

The Church of the Nazarene, with headquarters in Kansas City, has a two-sentence statement that gambling should be avoided. For many groups, the issue has been all but forgotten. The National Council of Churches last adopted a policy statement on gambling in 1951.

For those on the frontlines, it can be lonely. “There is no recognition that this is an important issue beyond their resolutions,” Grey says. “It’s entirely something else to engage in battle.” And he believes the gambling industry pays no attention to church resolutions.

“I have found no willingness on the part of organized religion to really look at this,” says Fowler. During the past two years, 44 percent of calls to the Florida Council on Compulsive Gambling help line have come from Protestants and 27 percent from Catholics. She says she has repeatedly—and unsuccessfully—sought to partner with congregations and parachurch groups to spread the word on the potential dangers of elderly gambling. Fowler says, “Typically we get a form letter that says, We appreciate the information and the work that you do. Thank you and goodbye.”

LOSING THE WAR? Throughout the 1990s, gambling has been legalized in state after state as lawmakers sought ways to raise revenues without raising taxes in spite of low unemployment and a booming national economy.

Along the way, governments in states such as Mississippi switched from being watchdog to promoter (CT, May 18, 1998, p. 34). In November, gambling forces mustered enough strength to oust two incumbent governors who took antigambling stands, Republicans Fob James of Alabama and David Beasley of South Car o lina, a state with nearly 30,000 video poker machines in convenience stores, bowling alleys, and even beauty salons.

Now some state governments, including Missouri—which receives $175 million a year in taxes based on $1 collected for every admission—appear to be addicted to gambling revenues. In 1997, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that slot machines in 11 riverboat casinos violated state law because they actually sat in artificial basins rather than on a main channel of the Missouri or Mississippi rivers. The state legislature passed an “emergency” bill to expand the definition of a river to include up to 1,000 feet from the actual shoreline. Gambling interests spent $10 million in a successful advertising campaign to keep the boats in moats legal in a referendum last November.

States are in a never-ending game to loosen restrictions in order to keep their customers from crossing boundary lines for richer stakes. For example, Iowa, the first state to legalize riverboat casinos in 1991, initially limited losses to $200 a day. Illinois, across the Mississippi River, allowed gambling six months later with no ceiling on bets. Iowa then quickly scrubbed the notion of a loss limit.

As gambling has prevailed, Grey has become increasingly pessimistic. “We fought a good battle, but we’re going to be overrun,” he says. “I’ve been in this for eight years, and now we’re down to the nitty gritty.”

Grey, an army captain infantry commander during the Vietnam War, is continuing his fight against legalized gambling with volunteer recruits, including stay-at-home moms, dentists, pastors, and small-business owners.

Of the organization’s $130,000 annual budget, $15,000 comes from the Latter-day Saints, while different state conferences of the Southern Baptist Convention contribute another $15,000. Grey’s own denomination, the UMC, which had supplied $35,000 a year, no longer does so, although officials say they are working on restoring the funds.

A PURPOSE OTHER THAN MONEY: Of the few Christian ministries involved with resisting gambling, most focus on picking up the people ruined by gambling and are not on the frontlines crusading for gambling to be outlawed.

“It doesn’t work to say the lottery and gambling are sinful,” says Lorraine Minor, 55, director of family ministries at City Union Mission, the largest in Kansas City. “We need to teach people to find a purpose other than money being their god.”

Those who are actively engaged in helping gambling addicts usually are those who have been there. In addition to attending GA meetings, Jake P. leads a biweekly Christian-based recovery program at his nondenominational church in Lombard, Illinois. Jake tailors the 12-step program to spiritual healing, restoration, and the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

For many of the elderly in Man hat tan’s Chinatown, gambling has been a way of life for generations. “My father always gambled in Hong Kong, and we had to sell our shoe shop be cause of it,” recalls pastor John Lo. After sixth grade, Lo had to go to work as a shoemaker to help support the family.

Despite his father’s losses, Lo began gambling at just about every game available at age 13. “I often didn’t go to school but went gambling with my friends.”

But Lo became a Christian, dedicated himself to helping Chinatown’s poor, and went on to found the influential Chinese Christian Herald Crusade, which runs a holistic ministry that includes a senior center.

As another bus en route to Atlantic City passes, Lo observes, “Gambling addiction can be overcome. God can change anyone.”

With reporting by Tony Carnes in Atlantic City.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

John and Shirley Wind returned to their home in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, late Friday night, October 30, in a torrential downpour. There was a message on their answering machine: “Go help Jose Arias.”

The Winds had served as missionaries in Honduras for 19 years with the Christian Reformed World Missions (CRWM)—sending arm of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC)—and Jose Arias was pastor of a small CRC church in the neighborhood of San Jose de La Vega. The Winds quickly changed and left their home for Arias’s church. “It was raining so hard,” Shirley later described in an e-mail, “we could see the water rushing under the bridge.”

They arrived at the church around 11:30 p.m. to find over 100 people from the community seeking refuge from the storm. “We assessed the situation and decided to go back home to pick up food and blankets and to take those who wanted to to stay at our house.”

They left for home at midnight but quickly realized they would have to turn back. “The river had risen so rapidly there was no way out. The water was now over the bridges, and the road looked like a river.”

Trapped in the small church building with their people, the Winds could only watch the water rise as Hurricane Mitch—having already wreaked havoc on the northern Caribbean coast—bore down mercilessly in the central and southern parts of Honduras. “We all stayed awake, and from time to time, someone would check to see how high the water level was. John saw a car perched on a fence. Houses and trees were floating down the raging river.”

Their final departure from Honduras had been scheduled for December 1998, and John and Shirley Wind did not expect that the last weeks of their missionary service would entail fighting for their lives and the lives of their church people in the wake of Mitch. As it was, another kind of storm had been preoccupying them during their final season of service.

Strife had arisen between the national churches they served. John and Shirley (and the other missionaries) found themselves in the awkward position of trying to remain neutral while sister churches attempted to work through their differing visions of what it meant to be the church. The denominational strength they had achieved over these years and the very life and health of many of their church plants seemed jeopardized. In the midst of the tumult, leaders from the flagship CRC church in Tegucigalpa, called First Church, questioned the ongoing role of the missionaries. “Our problem was a national [problem] and not a missionary one,” said First Church member Chrystabel Parchment.

The Winds had already been scheduled to complete their final term, so the turmoil between the national churches did not affect their departure. Nevertheless, at the sunset of their two-decade career in Honduras, the Winds faced saying good-bye amidst uncertainty and discord. They recognized that sometimes it takes as much faith for missionaries to answer the call to leave as it did to come in the first place.

Coming with the plan to leave“Third World countries today are not the same countries they were 50 years ago,” says Chet Thomas, executive director of Proyecto Aldea Global (Project Global Village), a Christian development agency in Honduras. He has lived in Honduras for 25 years, and nothing irritates him more than the idea of patronizing North Americans coming into a struggling country like Honduras and telling them what to do or—worse—giving them a handout. “People [in these countries] know where they want to go. They’re not ready to accept an agenda of a missionary who might come in from North America. Anyone considering going into missions should have the idea in the back of their minds, ‘Do they really need me?’ Or, ‘Can the national church do it on their own?’ When expatriates work in Third World countries,” he says, “it is just as important when they plan what they’re going to do that they also plan how they’re going to get out.”

And in that regard, the CRWM fits Thomas’s paradigm. The mission had come at the behest of Hondurans themselves in the 1970s and intended to withdraw by the year 2000. Gilber to Espinoza, a leading member at First Church in Tegucigalpa, re counts how his grandparents had heard the Back to God Hour (a CRC-sponsored radio program) on Christian radio, which prompted them to contact its sponsors in the U.S. and ask them to send missionaries to Honduras.

Pentecostalism had begun to flourish there (as elsewhere in Latin America), and Espinoza’s forebears had hoped to add a strong Reformed element to the blossoming Protestantism in Honduras.

On January 1, 1972, the first CRC missionaries arrived. At the request of and in partnership with the nationals, they helped establish the by-laws, organize the first classis (an organizational unit made up of congregations within a geographic area), and launch First Church in Tegucigalpa. Soon more missionaries were invited to come and help plant more churches in other regions of the country.

The Winds came as part of that second wave in 1979.

“To gain ownership, the nationals need to catch the vision of what God can do and what he wants to do through them,” says John Wind, quoting a fellow CRC missionary. “Our success will not be measured by how much we have done, but by what we have taught them to do for themselves.”

Steve Saint, son of the martyred missionary Nate Saint, who died at the hands of the Huaorani (better known as the Auca), highlights a danger inherent in this enterprise. “Missions is not to go in and create and control a church for other people, nor [to] be the church for them,” he said in an interview in Missions Frontier Bulletin (May/June 1998). “It is simply to plant the church … and nurture it until it is able to propagate, govern, and support itself. When missions go beyond that, then they are imposing themselves in the area of responsibility that belongs to the indigenous people, and then everything gets out of whack.” It takes wisdom on the part of sending agencies, and even greater sensitivity on the part of the missionaries, to strike the right balance in this delicate enterprise.

And still, things sometimes manage to get “out of whack.” In the case of John and Shirley Wind, it could be argued that they and their colleagues did their job so well that they created a fierce independence in the churches they served, which may have contributed to the turmoil they faced as they prepared to depart.

Dairy farmer turned pioneerJohn Wind had been destined to continue the family tradition of dairy farming in California when he and his young wife, Shirley, independent of each other, began to sense a call to missionary service. They had two children at the time (two more came later) and money in the bank to purchase land and launch out on their own. They prayed about it for a year, and when the calling to serve in missions seemed unshakable, they sold their belongings and began preparing for a life of service overseas. John took a degree at Reformed Bible College, and they went to language school in Texas, then applied to the CRWM. There was an opening in Tegucigalpa, and the Winds found themselves stepping into an untamed world that bore little resemblance to farm life.

Honduras, population 6 million, is no larger than the state of Tennessee. It is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, with per capita purchasing power of around $2,000 (according to a 1996 estimate), a 15 percent unemployment rate, and 40 percent underemployment—before Hurricane Mitch.

Olancho is the province in middle Honduras, about a four-hour drive from Tegucigalpa, known as the wild west of Honduras, where ranchers and farmers live. The air is clean, the roads are bad (often slowed by herds of cows or goats), and life is an adventure. “¡Olan chanos son tremendos!” became a catch phrase among the missionaries be cause of the Olanchanos‘ robust independence (at one point in Honduras’s history, Olancho wanted to break off and become its own country), their unwillingness to take a handout, and their enthusiastic response to the gospel. The church-planting efforts exploded there.

“Our success will not be measured by how much we have done, but by what we have taught them to do for themselves.”
—John Wind

But the success in Olancho also exposed an underbelly of need, the most obvious being the lack of trained leadership. “People would get up to preach and started realizing their limitations,” says Tom Soerens, who teaches theology at Dordt College, but who served with the CRWM in Honduras for over 13 years. “There was fire and maturity, but they needed training to understand the biblical texts.” To address this, Soerens helped expand the work of a seminary in Tegucigalpa for training pastors and church leaders.

But there were other less tangible, but no less glaring, deficiencies. “One of the most crucial areas in leadership training is Christian character development, nurturing truly spiritual leaders who are humble servants,” says John Wind. This is not easily done in a land where machismo defines masculine headship.

In a video the Winds use to explain their ministry, they contrast the legacies of North America with South/Central America. Unlike the Pilgrims who settled the Massachusetts Bay area (and elsewhere) with the hopes of building a better life and enjoying religious freedom, the Spanish conquerors came to the Americas to enslave the indigenous populations and take their gold. Rather than working toward a system of government that honored freedoms and individual rights, the Spanish imposed a feudalistic, vertical society, where the have-nots existed to serve the haves; they enforced a hierarchical view of the Catholic church; and they modeled machismo—the conquest and domination (and often abuse) of men over women.

Over time, Spaniards intermarried with Indians and the population began to be filled out by mestizos (the mixing of the two races). The result has been a cultural environment that reflects the dehumanizing effects of the conquest. Rampant infidelity, juvenile delinquency, children born out of wedlock, child abuse, and alcoholism pervade all levels of society in Honduras. These pose a formidable challenge for the success of the Protestant church and the gospel ethic. And these are the areas the Winds targeted in their ministry.

“The Word of God cannot be detained, even by the Devil himself,” says Virgilio Reyes, a pastor and evangelist in Olancho. This young Honduran church leader stands out as an example of what the tenacity of the farm ethic can bring to an otherwise uncultivated ministry context.

Reyes was spiritually nurtured and mentored by CRC missionaries who had been living in Olancho. He quickly grew in his leadership qualities and exuded a passion and vision for planting the gospel in this neglected field. His poise and resolve won Reyes the affirmation of the Olancho classes, which selected him in 1989 to start a church in the region’s largest city, Juticalpa (pronounced hoo-tee-cal -pah). Up to then, despite being the hub of activity in Honduras’s campo (countryside), no CRC presence existed.

John Wind was commissioned by the mission and the national churches to work with Reyes in this church-planting effort. That meant a lot of miles driving back and forth on dusty roads, making the four-hour trip between Tegucigalpa and Olancho. In addition to spending many hours strategizing and praying, Reyes and Wind spent most of their time walking from home to home (that’s a lot of walking in the campo), knocking on doors, and inquiring if people would be interested in a Bible study. Many were. And for months, John and Reyes re turned to those homes and held Bible studies, sometimes with only one person (often the mother). In time, they were able to consolidate some of these gatherings, until finally—after five months of networking—they held their first service in Reyes’s home. Fifteen people attended, all women.

Eventually the praying, studying, counseling, and walking reached a point of critical mass, and the church took off. By the end of the fourth year, they had purchased desirable property on which to build the church and soon added another building for a school. Today, approximately 151 people attend the church and 80 students attend the school (K–3rd grade, adding a grade every year).

The CRWM and national churches financially supported Reyes in this undertaking, but on a decreasing scale. (It is the mission’s policy that local congregations pay the salary of their pastors.) Eventually the church in Juticalpa grew to the place where it could assume responsibility for Reyes’s support. (He supplements his income with part-time farming; selling medicines; and, with his wife, running a little store.)

Since the church plant in Juticalpa ten years ago, Reyes has planted seven other daughter churches in the outlying areas. Today there are about 48 churches in Olancho, and he has hopes of seeing more churches planted farther north, along the coast. He says, “If an established church does not begin a daughter church, then that church is navel gazing.”

In addition to John’s discipleship and church planting ministries, the medical brigades, orchestrated by Shirley Wind and sponsored by the Luke Society (an international health service headquartered in Sioux Falls, S.D.), have proven to have a positive effect on church growth in the countryside. Every year since 1981, she has planned and facilitated the two-week visits of some 40 medical personnel from the U.S., including plastic and orthopedic surgeons, anesthesiologists, pediatricians, OB-GYNs, cardiologists, dentists, RNs, and support personnel, who have worked either in the hospital in Juticalpa or in more rustic areas in remote villages.

Honduran doctor Nestor Salavarria first encountered the North American doctors as a medical student. He helped on a brigade in 1984 for the experience “and also to acquire the medical-type T-shirts,” he says.

He was not a Christian but was greatly impressed when the North American doctors helped save the life of one of his patients with an advanced stage of tetanus. They responded with “so much medicine that it was enough for about 50 people.”

Over these many years since, Salavarria—who “had an experience with the Lord” shortly after that initial meeting—has won stature and respect in the medical community in Honduras. He runs the Clinic of the Good Shepherd, near Juticalpa, and it has become a critical and significant health-care center in the area, treating over 100 patients daily. He has worked closely with Shirley Wind (who is trained as a nurse) in prearranging the surgeries and setting up the surgery schedule. On average, during their two-week visit, the surgical team would perform over 100 operations, seeing no end to such maladies as club feet, cleft palates, hernias, machete wounds, and burns. The team in the remote villages could treat up to 500 patients a day, many of whom come on horseback or on foot, traveling for days. Shirley recalls a 33-year-old mother bringing her 15 children to one clinic, all malnourished, and a comatose man who was carried in by four friends. As a result of the physical care and evangelistic efforts of these brigades, 15 churches have been started out in the campo.

The Winds brought a “spiritual covering” to the brigade ministry, says Salavarria. Shirley took on the role of spiritual counselor (all patients were assigned one). On one occasion, she met a man who had been shot and, while he was awaiting surgery, asked if she could read some Scripture. He was surly and intended to shoot his assailant after he recovered, but he agreed to let her read.

She read from the Gospels about the crucifixion. Though he didn’t accept the Lord, he had tears in his eyes as she read. The next day after his surgery, she asked him again if he would like to give his life to the Lord. This time he said he would. “He wasn’t ready to forgive the man who shot him,” she says. “But he said he wasn’t going to go shoot him.”

The Winds together also had overwhelming success in developing a marriage and family ministry. In 1992, they team-taught a seminary class on the topic. The pastors then asked the Winds to come and offer the course in their churches, which was so successful the Winds eventually devoted half of their time to the seminars. They regularly taught a seven-week “Marriage Builder” course in churches in Tegucigalpa and sponsored marriage-retreat weekends throughout Honduras.

“There is no real concept of an intimate relationship as a couple, even if they’re Christians,” says Efrain Villeda who, with his wife, Olga, now leads the marriage ministry in Juticalpa. “There are so many problems in marriages, like when the wife was raped [in her childhood] by a family member. Even when they marry a Christian man, it is not very good because of the trauma. These retreats cover important themes like communication, sexuality, and marriage conflicts. They help people express their feelings, with God’s help.”

“The most important thing the Winds have taught us is their testimony as a couple,” says Olga Villeda. “The unity and love they transmit to each other give us the idea of what unity looks like.”

Two visions for the churchThe success of the church-plant projects in Olancho and other parts of the country (there are more than 70 CRC churches in Honduras) enhanced the status of the Protestant church generally and the CRC specifically. “Before, when the government had a meeting for some commission, the evangelicals were never invited,” says Gilberto Espinoza. “Now that has changed. Last year [1997] Franklin Graham held conferences at the national stadium and political figures showed up—such as the presidential candidates, members of congress, the mayor, and people who have a major influence on the country,” he says.

“The growth of the evangelical church has been great,” adds Dinora, his wife. “At one time it was only 10 percent; now evangelicals make up 30 percent of the population in Honduras. Catholics are worried—and are calling them Christians. The presence of the evangelical churches is being noticed, whereas before they had been ignored.”

“Clearly the Christian Reformed Church is integrated with these other Christian churches,” says Gilberto. “And we should be part of these [governmental] institutions so we can expand the throne of our Lord socially and politically, and not only in the religious aspect.”

It is this vision for the role of the evangelical church in Honduras that highlights some of the differences between First Church and the smaller, poorer churches in the countryside.

The Honduran poor don’t dream about dining with dignitaries and being invited to sit on the platform at national events. Their passion for the church is more localized, focusing on individuals’ salvation in the context of the community under the leadership of the local pastor. “Remember, your appointment is with Christ,” says Virgilio Reyes when he visits people. First Church, on the other hand, has envisioned the Reformed churches operating on every level of Honduran society, including the institutional level. This vision seemed reachable and desirable to a church made up of upper-class Hondurans.

As the time approached when the missionaries would withdraw, these differing visions intensified and uncertainty bubbled up. Some in First Church began fearing that the exuberance and independence in the smaller churches might blur their Reformed identity (confusing it with the Pentecostals) and undercut their unity as a denomination. “The Reformed church needs to be strong in its doctrine,” says Dinora Espinoza. “We have to be careful so that we have a good testimony before our country.”

This fear (real or perceived), in conjunction with the approaching withdrawal deadline predetermined by the CRWM, prompted some leaders in First Church to reclaim their status as the ones who brought the missionaries in the first place. They determined what, in their minds, would be the best course for all the CRC churches, making decisions about the running of the seminary, the status of the church properties, and the role of the missionaries (they did not renew residency visas of some). This, in turn, unnerved some of the other churches, who felt left out of the process.

“The wisdom of what John Wind was doing was confirmed by what happened, positively and negatively,” says Tom Soerens. Wind’s emphasis on discipleship and “joint accountability,” says Soerens, “is not an easy concept to make work in a vertically empowered society. The top-down model is all they know in Honduras, so the covenantal model is more difficult.”

So after nearly three decades, the mission of the CRWM in Honduras ended where it began—with the leadership of First Church. And though, as the Winds packed their bags they did so amidst pain and some discord, it remained Shirley’s hope that “the chaff [of this conflict] will be blown away, and that what remains will please him.”

“Change always produces friction,” says Ken Hanna, who is chair of the missions department at Moody Bible Institute and who served overseas for over 30 years in Latin America. The turmoil that erupted between the CRC churches in Honduras, he says, “is not unlike what has happened with any other mission board in other parts of the world.”

He uses the Spanish word laguna—gap—to describe what happens. “When a mission goes in, they usually send highly trained people. They are leaders. They can be caring and servant types, but they are still leaders. If you pull a whole group out at one time—even if you do it incrementally—you leave a huge vacuum.”

The laguna, he says, is “the vacuum of vision” that exists after the missionaries leave. “The mission knew [when they went in] that they were going to leave.” In that respect, preparing for that was their goal. Once they are gone, says Hanna, “the national church is left wondering, ‘Now what?’ This could result in a fractured vision, and they can become splintered if they can’t agree on what their purpose is.

“The national church is at its best,” he says, “when it is unified around a single purpose.”

After the stormAll of this turmoil between the churches, of course, took place before Hur ri cane Mitch. Before the hurricane, the Winds were encouraging the leadership and hoping to stabilize relationships between churches in the wake of the tumult. After the hurricane, the Winds were digging their church people out of the mud and trying to keep them from emotional and physical collapse under the weight of such devastation.

On the night of October 30, as the members of Jose Arias’s church waited and watched the water rise, Shirley Wind says it “rose so rapidly it was like a 15-foot tidal wave.” By morning, only four-wheelers could navigate what was left of the roads and had to take circuitous routes to get anywhere since the bridges no longer existed. A little more than a block beyond the church, says John, “We saw the fire department in their rafts rescuing people off their roofs.”

Jose Arias, the pastor of the church, had been another of John Wind’s disciples. He had met “Mr. John” at the age of 11. Jose learned a “working hard attitude” from John, who mentored and nurtured him “like a father, and I was like his son,” he says. Arias, like Virgilio Reyes, was numbered among the first graduating class at the CRC seminary, and today he oversees a congregation-based school of theology in San Jose de La Vega.

The morning after the flood, Shirley Wind recalls, “We could see that the water and mud had risen over the top of the house where pastor Jose lived.” Jose and his wife, Norma, and their children lost everything—their refrigerator, their stove, their books, their papers, their clothes, their children’s birth certificates, their marriage certificate, his theological library—”everything except their lives,” she says. They were numbered among the 141 people from San Jose de La Vega who had to be sheltered in the church, sleeping on benches or on top of the kindergarten tables. The Winds and the other CRC missionaries provided blankets, medicines, food, and water—that is, until their own supplies also ran out.

“We could have been living in a foreign country,” says Shirley. “We had to learn everything again—how to cook, how to eat, how to sleep, how to get water.”

Fresh water came forth from beneath the steps of the church at San Jose de la Vega. The church members shared their miracle with the whole neighborhood.

The CRC churches in other parts of Honduras did not fare much better. Eighty people in Reyes’s church in Juticalpa had to live in the school behind the church, their homes either destroyed or filled with mud. Members from an other church in Olancho spent three days living in a cave. Olancho’s fertile topsoil was washed away and farmers didn’t know where their cows were; all their fences were gone.

People with symptoms like diarrhea, upper respiratory infections, and funguses overwhelmed Nestor Salavarria at the Clinic of the Good Shepherd. His father had lived in one of the areas hardest hit and suffered a fatal stroke while trying to unplug a drain. So on top of his added duties at the clinic, Salavarria also had to bury his father.

Words like apocalyptic and catastrophic appeared regularly in news reports about the situation in Honduras. Some Hondurans asked, “What is God trying to say to us?” Others wondered if God was “cleaning” the country of its corruption. Still others said it was a test for the young Protestant church.

But most—including the members of the church in San Jose de La Vega, the members of the churches in Olancho, the members of First Church, and the missionaries—were simply trying to make it through another day. And in that respect, the hurricane became the great equalizer, and surviving it became the “unifying purpose” around which the CRC churches could rally. Churches that had been alienated by strife before Mitch pulled together and helped each other after the storm. The pastor from First Church visited Jose Arias many times, bringing food and clothing, asking what he needed and how First Church could serve him and his church.

“Everybody needed help. Everybody got help,” says Shirley. So in a strange way, the hurricane overturned the social dynamics that contributed to the inter-church strife: The churches emerged unified as a healing and life-giving force.

One day shortly after the flood, the people at San Jose de La Vega noticed water gurgling up from beneath the steps of the church. At first, they thought it was part of the flooding and needed to be plugged up. But soon they realized the water was fresh and potable—emanating from a natural underground spring. No water was flowing into homes through faucets because the city pipes had been damaged and, for a long time, water trucks could not get bottled water into some neighborhoods because the bridges were out. But fresh water came forth from beneath the steps of the church at San Jose de La Vega. The church members shared their miracle with the whole neighborhood.

They could not have explained why God chose their church steps to be the fountainhead of that fresh-water spring amidst so much need. But they shared their blessing and gave the glory to God. This unexpected miracle in the midst of equally unexpected devastation helped them to live with this simple truth: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away.

The same could be said of the missionaries. Says Gilberto Espinoza: “A lot of missionaries have come to help us, and gone. They have left their grain of sand; some a little, some a lot.”

Before the Winds left in February 1999 (delayed for two months because of the hurricane), John recounted that “this year has probably been the most difficult of all our years in Honduras,” between the internal strife and the devastation of the hurricane. As a gesture of good will, the members of First Church honored the Winds with a service of appreciation and a wooden cross. “We thank the Lord for bringing us through these difficulties and giving us peace and joy as we leave Honduras.”

The Macedonians asked Paul in a vision, “Come over here and help us” (Acts 16:9, NLT). The Honduran Christians asked the same of the CRWM, and the Winds answered that call. And as the Spirit alerted Paul when it was time to move on, the Winds have been so alerted, and have answered that call too.

Jose Arias said their leaving was like “pulling a carrot from the earth—when people come and learn the culture and learn to love and settle here, when you take them away, it hurts.”

“People are important but not indispensable,” adds Virgilio Reyes. “God is going to keep his kingdom. If we do not have the same missionary spirit of the Winds, God’s Word is not going to stop. We feel it deep in our hearts that they are leaving because they are like family. But if it is God’s will that they go, we’re going to go on, with God’s help. The Word of God cannot be detained,” he says.

The Winds are now serving in Mexico. When their brothers and sisters in the Honduran churches said their good-byes, they told the Winds: “God wants you to go to Mexico. We pray for you as you go. You have to go, because God has called you.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. … But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
—ROMANS 5:6,8, NRSV

In 1996 James Van Tholen, then 31, and his wife, Rachel, moved to Rochester, New York, where Jim became pastor of a Christian Reformed Church. Members of the church found themselves drawn to Jim’s ministry, especially to his preaching, which gleamed with biblical intelligence and humane understanding.

Then, the unthinkable occurred: in the late winter of 1998, physicians identified and surgically removed a liposarcoma from behind Jim’s right knee. Within weeks Jim had another tumor behind his chest wall, and then spots on both femurs and one kidney. Recent tests confirm cancer up and down Jim’s spine, with the result that he now thinks about how he moves, always conscious of the risk of spinal cord compression (and paralysis).

From March until October, Jim struggled to recover from surgery and to absorb forms of chemotherapy that offered no cure but could prolong his life somewhat. By October, the chemotherapy had suppressed Jim’s cancer enough that he was able to return to his pulpit.

What follows is the sermon Jim preached from Romans 5:1–11 on the morning of his return, October 18, 1998. As the members of the congregation listened to their young preacher’s sermon, they understood something about dying and rising with Christ that they hadn’t known just that way before.

—Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.,dean of the chapel at Calvin Collegeand a former teacher of Van Tholen’s atCalvin Theological Seminary.

This is a strange day—for all of us. Most of you know that today marks my return to this pulpit after seven months of dealing with an aggressive and deadly form of cancer. Now, with the cancer vacationing for a little while, I am back. And of course I’m glad to be back. But I can’t help feeling how strange this day is—especially because I want to ignore my absence, and I want to pretend everybody has forgotten the reason for it.

But we can’t do that. We can’t ignore what has happened. We can rise above it; we can live through it; but we can’t ignore it. If we ignore the threat of death as too terrible to talk about, then the threat wins. Then we are overwhelmed by it, and our faith doesn’t apply to it. And if that happens, we lose hope.

We want to worship God in this church, and for our worship to be real, it doesn’t have to be fun, and it doesn’t have to be guilt-ridden. But it does have to be honest, and it does have to hope in God. We have to be honest about a world of violence and pain, a world that scorns faith and smashes hope and rebuts love. We have to be honest about the world, and honest about the difficulties of faith within it. And then we still have to hope in God.

So let me start with the honesty. The truth is that for seven months I have been scared. Not of the cancer, not really. Not even of death. Dying is another matter—how long it will take and how it will go. Dying scares me. But when I say that I have been scared, I don’t mean that my thoughts have centered on dying. My real fear has centered somewhere else. Strange as it may sound, I have been scared of meeting God.

How could this be so? How could I have believed in the God of grace and still have dreaded to meet him? Why did I stand in this pulpit and preach grace to you over and over, and then, when I myself needed the grace so much, why did I discover fear where the grace should have been?

I think I know the answer now. As the wonderful preacher John Timmer has taught me over the years, the answer is that grace is a scandal. Grace is hard to believe. Grace goes against the grain. The gospel of grace says that there is nothing I can do to get right with God, but that God has made himself right with me through Jesus’ bloody death. And that is a scandalous thing to believe.

God comes to us before we go to him. John Tim mer used to say that this is God’s habit. God came to Abraham when there was nothing to come to, just an old man at a dead end. But that’s God for you. That’s the way God likes to work. He comes to old men and to infants, to sinners and to losers. That’s grace, and a sermon without it is no sermon at all.

So I’ve tried to preach grace, to fill my sermons up with grace, to persuade you to believe in grace. And it’s wonderful work to have—that is, to stand here and preach grace to people. I got into this pulpit and talked about war and hom*osexuality and divorce. I talked about death before I knew what death really was. And I tried to bring the gospel of grace to these areas when I preached. I said that God goes to people in trouble, that God receives people in trouble, that God is a God who gets into trouble be cause of his grace. I said what our Heidelberg Catechism says: that our only comfort in life and in death is that we are not our own but belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

I said all those things, and I meant them. But that was before I faced death myself. So now I have a silly thing to admit: I don’t think I ever realized the shocking and radical nature of God’s grace—even as I preached it. And the reason I didn’t get it where grace is concerned, I think, is that I assumed I still had about forty years left. Forty years to unlearn my bad habits. Forty years to let my sins thin down and blow away. Forty years to be good to animals and pick up my neighbors’ mail for them when they went on vacation.

But that’s not how it’s going to go. Now I have months, not years. And now I have to meet my creator who is also my judge—I have to meet God not later, but sooner. I haven’t enough time to undo my wrongs, not enough time to straighten out what’s crooked, not enough time to clean up my life.

And that’s what has scared me.

So now, for the first time, I have to preach grace and know what I’m talking about. I have to preach grace and not only believe it, but rest on it, depend on it, stake my life on it. And as I faced the need to do this I remembered one of the simplest, most powerful statements in the entire Bible.

You may have thought that the reason for my choice of Romans 5 lay in the wonderful words about how suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Those are beautiful words, true words, but I’m not so sure they apply to me. I’m not sure I’ve suffered so much or so faithfully to claim that my hope has arisen through the medium of good character. No, many of you know far more about good character than I do, and more about suffering, too.

It wasn’t that beautiful chain with character as the main link that drew my attention to Romans 5; instead, it was just one little word in verses 6 and 8. It’s the Greek word eti, and it has brought comfort to my soul. The word means “yet” or “still,” and it makes all the difference between sin and grace. Paul writes that “while we were still weak Christ died for the ungodly.” He wants us to marvel at the Christ of the gospel, who comes to us in our weakness and in our need. Making sure we get the point, Paul uses the word twice in verse 6 in a repetitious and ungrammatical piling up of his meaning: “Still while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”

I’m physically weak, but that’s not my main weakness, my most debilitating weakness. What the last half year has proved to me is that my weakness is more of the soul than the body. This is what I’ve come to understand as I have dwelled on one question: How will I explain myself to my God? How can I ever claim to have been what he called me to be?

The center of my story—our story— is that the grace of Jesus Christ carries us beyond every cancer, every divorce, every sin, every trouble that comes to us.

And, of course, the scary truth is that I can’t. That’s the kind of weakness Paul is talking about. And that’s where eti comes in—while we were still weak, while we were still sinners, while we were still enemies of God, we were reconciled with him through the death of his Son. I find it unfathomable that God’s love propelled him to reach into our world with such scandalous grace, such a way out, such hope. No doubt God has done it, because there’s no hope anywhere else. I know. I’ve been looking. And I have come to see that the hope of the world lies only inside the cradle of God’s grace.

This truth has come home to me as I’ve been thinking what it will mean to die. The same friends I enjoy now will get together a year, and three years, and twenty years from now, and I will not be there, not even in the conversation. Life will go on. In this church you will call a new minister with new gifts and a new future, and eventually I’ll fade from your mind and memory. I understand. The same thing has happened to my own memories of others. When I was saying something like this a few months ago to a friend of mine, he reminded me of those poignant words of Psalm 103:15–16: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.” For the first time I felt those words in my gut; I understood that my place would know me no more.

In his poem “Adjusting to the Light,” Miller Williams explores the sense of awkwardness among Lazarus’s friends and neighbors just after Jesus has resuscitated him. Four days after his death, Lazarus returns to the land of the living and finds that people have moved on from him. Now they have to scramble to fit him back in:

Lazarus, listen, we have things to tell you. We killed the sheep you meant to take to market. We couldn’t keep the old dog, either. He minded you. The rest of us he barked at. Rebecca, who cried two days, has given her hand to the sandalmaker’s son. Please understand—we didn’t know that Jesus could do this.

We’re glad you’re back. But give us time to think. Imagine our surprise. … We want to say we’re sorry for all of that. And one thing more. We threw away the lyre. But listen, we’ll pay whatever the sheep was worth. The dog, too. And put your room the way it was before.

Miller Williams has it just right. After only a few days, Lazarus’s place knew him no more. Before cancer, I liked Williams’s poem, but now I’m living it. Believe me: hope doesn’t lie in our legacy; it doesn’t lie in our longevity; it doesn’t lie in our personality or our career or our politics or our children or, heaven knows, our goodness. Hope lies in eti.

So please don’t be surprised when in the days ahead I don’t talk about my cancer very often. I’ve told a part of my story today, because it seemed right to do it on the first day back after seven months. But what we must talk about here is not me. I cannot be our focus, because the center of my story—our story—is that the grace of Jesus Christ carries us beyond every cancer, every divorce, every sin, every trouble that comes to us. The Christian gospel is the story of Jesus, and that’s the story I’m called to tell.

I’m dying. Maybe it will take longer instead of shorter; maybe I’ll preach for several months, and maybe for a bit more. But I am dying. I know it, and I hate it, and I’m still frightened by it. But there is hope, unwavering hope. I have hope not in something I’ve done, some purity I’ve maintained, or some sermon I’ve written. I hope in God—the God who reaches out for an enemy, saves a sinner, dies for the weak.

That’s the gospel, and I can stake my life on it. I must. And so must you.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Twenty-six years after the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, the public debate on abortion seems to have reached a stalemate. The issue continues to be debated in Congress and state legislatures across the country, but, year to year, there seems to be little change in public opinion.

This does not mean, however, that the abortion issue is going to recede in intensity any time soon. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is simply that "the majority of Americans morally disapprove of the majority of abortions currently performed," as University of Virginia sociologist James Hunter concludes in his path-breaking 1994 book, Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Culture Wars. Hunter's analysis is based on the 1991 Gallup poll "Abortion and Moral Beliefs," the most thorough survey of American attitudes toward abortion yet conducted.

The Gallup study found that 77 percent of Americans believe that abortion is at least the "taking of human life" (28 percent), if not "murder" itself (49 percent). Other polls confirm these findings. And yet, while many Americans—perhaps 60 percent in the middle—see legalized abortion as an evil, they see it as "necessary."

The Chicago Tribune aptly summarized the situation in a September 1996 editorial: "Most Americans are uncomfortable with all-or-nothing policies on abortion. They generally shy away from proposals to ban it in virtually all circ*mstances, but neither are they inclined to make it available on demand no matter what the circ*mstances. They regard it, at best, as a necessary evil."

If Middle America—as Hunter calls the 60 percent—sees abortion as an evil, why is it thought to be necessary? Although the 1991 Gallup poll did not probe this question specifically, it made clear that it is not because Middle America sees abortion as necessary to secure equal opportunities for women. For example, less than 30 percent believe abortion is acceptable in the first three months of pregnancy if the pregnancy would require a teenager to drop out of school (and the number drops below 20 percent if the abortion is beyond three months). Likewise, less than 20 percent support abortion in the first three months of pregnancy if the pregnancy would interrupt a woman's career (and that support drops to 10 percent if the abortion is after the third month).

Four "necessary" myths Instead, many Americans, therefore, may see abortion as "necessary" to avert "the back alley." In this sense, the notion of legal abortion as a "necessary evil" is based on a series of myths widely disseminated since the 1960s. These myths captured the public mind and have yet to be rebutted.

Myth #1: One to two million illegal abortions occurred annually before legalization. In fact, the annual total in the few years before abortion on demand was no more than tens of thousands and most likely fewer. For example, in California, the most populous state where it was alleged that 100,000 illegal abortions occurred annually in the 1960s, only 5,000 abortions were performed in 1968, the first full year of legalization.

Myth #2: Thousands of women died annually from abortions before legalization. As a leader in the legalization movement, Dr. Bernard Nathanson later wrote: "How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always '5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.' I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose that others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the 'morality' of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?"

In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statistics in 1972 show that 39 women died from illegal abortion and 27 died from legal abortion.

Myth #3: Abortion law targeted women rather than abortionists before legalization. In fact, the nearly uniform policy of the states for nearly a century before 1973 was to treat the woman as the second victim of abortion.

Myth #4: Legalized abortion has been good for women. In fact, women still die from legal abortion, and the general impact on health has had many negative consequences, including the physical and psychological toll that many women bear, the epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, the general coarsening of male-female relationships over the past 30 years, the threefold increase in the repeat-abortion rate, and the increase in hospitalizations from ectopic pregnancies.

A generation of Americans educated by these myths sees little alternative to legalized abortion. It is commonly believed that prohibitions on abortion would not reduce abortion and only push thousands of women into "the back alley" where many would be killed or injured. Prohibitions would mean no fewer abortions and more women injured or killed. Wouldn't that be worse than the status quo?

Middle America's sense that abortion is a necessary evil explains a lot of things, and, by giving coherent explanation to many disparate facts and impressions, it may provide a way beyond the stalemate to—as Hunter calls for—an elevation in the content and conduct of the public debate.

First, this notion of abortion as a necessary evil explains the seemingly contradictory polls showing that a majority of Americans believe both that abortion is murder and that it should be legal. The most committed pro-life Americans see legality and morality to be inextricably intertwined and therefore view the pol ling data as contradictory. But Middle America understands "legal" versus "illegal" not in moral terms but in practical terms—criminalizing the procedure. Based on the historical myths, Middle America believes that criminalizing abortion would only aggravate a bad situation.

Second, the myth of abortion as a necessary evil also explains the power of the "choice" rhetoric. For the most committed abortion proponents, "choice" means moral autonomy. But there are less ideological meanings. According to the choice rhetoric, Americans can persuade women to make another choice, but they can't make abortion illegal, because that would mean no fewer abortions and simply push women into the back alley. This explains why Middle America will support virtually any regulation, short of making abortions illegal, that will encourage alternatives and reduce abortions. In a sense, by supporting legal regulations but not prohibitions, many Americans may believe that they are choosing "the lesser of two evils."

The rhetoric of abortion as a "necessary evil" (though not the phrase itself) is a key tactic of abortion advocates. It is roughly reflected in President Clinton's slogan that he wants abortion to be "safe, legal, and rare" and is at the heart of the President's veto of the federal partial-birth abortion bill. In the face of polls showing that 70 to 80 percent of Americans oppose the procedure, the President says that the procedure is horrible (it's an evil) but contends that "a few hundred women" every year must have the procedure (it's necessary).

Indeed, the rhetoric of abortion as a necessary evil is designed to sideline Americans' moral qualms about abortion. For example, when Congress first began to consider the bill prohibiting partial-birth abortion, abortion advocates bought a full-page advertisem*nt in the New York Times showing a large coat hanger and the caption, "Will this be the only approved method of abortion?" The coat hanger, reinforcing the image of the back alley, remains a powerful rhetorical symbol. It reinforces the notion that there are two and only two alternatives: abortion on demand or the back alley.

Finally, the myth of abortion as a "necessary evil" also explains why 49 percent of Americans may believe that abortion is "murder" without translating this into fervent social or political mobilization. While Middle Americans may view abortion as an evil, they view it as intractable. For this reason, they view fervent campaigns to prohibit abortion as unrealistic if not counterproductive, while they are drawn to realistic alternatives and regulations. They agree that there are too many abortions and would like to see them reduced. Abortion is not a galvanizing electoral issue for Middle America, because Middle America doesn't see that much can be done about the issue legally or politically.

The future of abortion The myth of abortion as a necessary evil has serious implications for future public debate. First, it means that abortion opponents have won the essential debate that the unborn is a human being and not mere tissue. In fact, the whole thrust of the "choice" argument admits this and seeks to sideline Americans' moral qualms by telling Americans that, even if it is a human life, the most that can be done is to persuade women not to have abortions.

Second, it means that the ideological arguments of both sides ("choice" versus "child") often miss the much more practical concerns of many Americans.

Third, it means that Americans balance the fate of the woman and the fate of the child. Although they understand the fate of the child to be fatal, they want to avoid the same result for women and believe that legalized abortion has been good generally for women.

This means that maximizing the fatal impact of abortion through, for example, graphic pictures of aborted babies is not a "silver bullet" that will transform public opinion alone. Instead, elevating the content and conduct of the public debate requires addressing both aspects—the impact on women as well as the impact on the child. Helping the public understand the impact on both, and the alternatives available, may contribute to a renewal of public dialogue that we so sorely need on this issue.

But a renewal of the public dialogue won't mean much if the people are not allowed to express the public will on this issue, as they usually do in our democratic republic. Twenty-six years ago, the Supreme Court claimed hegemony over the issue and created a nationwide rule of abortion on demand, preventing democratic debate and solutions. The public policy dictated by the Supreme Court collides with majority opinion and reflects the views of only the 20 percent who are committed to abortion on demand. Twenty-six years later, that is the main reason the pot keeps boiling.

Clarke D. Forsythe is attorney and president of Americans United for Life in Chicago.

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