Page 4563 – Christianity Today (2024)

Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, by Nancy Mairs (Beacon, 212 pp.; $20, hardcover). Reviewed by Elizabeth Cody Newenhuyse, the author of many books, including Cooked to Perfection: How to Respond When Life Turns Up the Heat, published this month by Zondervan.

My husband’s aunt was as close to perfect as you can get, at least by society’sstandards. Attractive, fit, beautifully dressed, wealthy, and well connected,she was an achiever who quickly rose through the ranks in the telecommunicationsbusiness. It all could make a person jealous, except that she was genuinelykind and a delight to be with.

She is still attractive, still delightful company. But she isn’t perfectanymore. You wouldn’t know it to look at her, but for the last several years,Marsha has had multiple sclerosis. She tires easily, lacks sensation in herfeet, can’t maintain her former CEO pace. But there is somethingin her very imperfection that seems to have given her life new depth andpoignancy.

Nancy Mairs would understand. Mairs, an essayist whose immune system turnedtraitor in her twenties, is now wheelchair-bound from MS.In this memoir, Mairs, now fiftysomething, writes of what it is like to livewith a disability, what the disabled would like the rest of us to understand,what “physical, emotional, moral, and spiritual elements shape the ‘differences’founded by disability.”

These issues, as she points out, are becoming increasingly urgent in oursociety (and, I would add, in the church). We are living longer, but at acost: “Life expectancy has increased more than thirty years since the turnof the century, a span that offers all kinds of new possibilities—amongthem, alas, the chance that illness or accident will permanently alter physicalcapabilities. … [We] need a theoretical and imaginative framework forevaluating and managing the repercussions.”

Absent a cure for illnesses like MS (or chronic fatigue syndromeor Alzheimer’s disease), Aunt Marsha will have a lot of company. The churchneeds to provide not only ramps and oversized bathroom stalls but also someinsight on what it means to live well, what it means to live within limitations,and how we can all, finally, free ourselves from the subtle idolatry of“wellness.”

One way to do so is to share our lives and our stories with others, and Mairsdoes that very well here, writing with energy and humor and honesty. We don’texpect the handicapped to be sarcastic, but Mairs is a “cripple” (as sherefers to herself) with an attitude. She is also a practicing Roman Catholicwho takes her faith seriously. It all makes for an eye-opening and refreshinglyunpredictable read.

Many of us look at the obviously disabled and think, I could never … Mairs didn’t think so either, but she has adjusted. She invites usto sit with her in her power wheelchair, helping us to see what life lookslike from her vantage point (hence the title). Here she describes one morningwhen there was a “breakdown in the Nancy-care apparatus”:

I wake Wednesday morning restlessly, surfacing and drifting and sinking and surfacing again as I wait for [my husband] George to rush in, rouse and raise me, make the bed while I use the toilet, tug on my clothes, and give me a hasty kiss before dashing out of the house.

But George has already left for his teaching job, and Nancy’s other helper,her sister Sally, isn’t coming until Thursday. What to do?

I am in a pickle. … My bladder is full. I reach for the control to my electric bed, lower my feet, and raise my head as far as it will go. The next part is tricky, since I have to work my legs over the edge and then push my trunk upright. A false move will pitch me onto my back like a beetle or forward into a heap on the floor; in either case, I’ll be there for eight hours.

She manages, getting into her chair, into and out of the shower, findingherself something to eat. “And now,” she concludes triumphantly,

here I am at the computer, limp but victorious; clean, clothed, and fed . …[Both George and I] understand that, over time, my competence at the slightest tasks will decrease rather than increase. But for this moment we can bask in a brief respite from dread.

Yet, as hard as it may seem for George—himself a survivor (so far) of melanomasurgery—and others to be so needed, and as hard as it is for Mairs to feelso needy, there is this: “I really do believe that actively nurturing yourfellow creatures through serving them, in what the Catholic Church designatesas corporal works of mercy, develops the whatever-you-call-it: the part ofthe human psyche that transcends self-interest.”

But what of mercy in the public square? Americans lovewinners, and Christians love triumph-over-tragedy accounts. These attitudes,Mairs says, inform prejudices toward the disabled, and all the federal mandatesstored in every database in every bureaucrat’s computer in the land can’tchange them. We’re comfortable with our own tribe, “morally righteous, intolerantof ambiguity, fearful of pain and death. We don’t like unpleasantness.”

The interesting thing here is that Mairs, prickly and contrarian,understands why people may respond in this way: usually, it is becausewe don’t see or know many folks with obvious disabilities. So, she says,“I must routinely roll out among [the nondisabled]. … The more perspectivethat can be brought to bear on human experience, even from the slant of awheelchair or a hospital bed, or through the ears of a blind person or thefingers of someone who is deaf, the richer that experience becomes.”

This is not a book for the squeamish. Mairs speaks candidly of George’s affairwith another woman—something not uncommon when one spouse is disabled andsexual issues (which she also explores) become problematic. Many people offaith will take issue with her views on the right-to-die debate: to oversimplify,Mairs believes that there are people who can live quite meaningfully as,say, double amputees, while others (including several not-very-crippledMS sufferers who died at the hands of Jack Kevorkian) hita “wall” of despair. Mairs is as vigorous defending the double amputee’schoice to live as she is defending the MS victim’s choiceto die.

But in this unpredictability, even inconsistency, lies the great power ofMairs’s story: Here is a whole and complex human being, not a poster child.And she is someone worth getting to know.

Short NoticesDancing with DisabilitiesBy Brett Webb-MitchellPilgrim Press152 pp.; $15.95, paperReviewed by Elizabeth Cody Newenhuyse

Duke professor Brett Webb-Mitchell challenges the church to open its doorsand hearts to the disabled. Telling the stories of children and adults withvarious handicaps, he brings a biblical and theological perspective to suchquestions as Who, really, is the family of God? What happens when a man withTourette’s syndrome wishes to share in the Lord’s Supper? What is the placeof worship in a publicly funded “home” for the developmentally disabled?How do we mediate between the “nation-state’s politics of independence” andthe church’s “politics of dependence”? Hard questions these, with which allof us need to wrestle.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christianity Today magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mailcteditor@christianitytoday.com.

Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, edited by Dorothy C. Bass (Jossey-Bass, 232 pp.; $22.50, hardcover);

The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity, by Thomas C. Reeves (Free Press, 276 pp.; $25, hardcover). Reviewed by Robert W. Patterson, a frequent contributor to Christianity Today.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, Sunday—the Lord’s Day—was special.The family routine said it all. On Saturday evening, we would get ready forthe big day, laying out our Sunday-dress clothes and shining the shoes, whileMom ironed shirts and dresses and Dad gave us boys haircuts. On Sunday morning,we would head off for Sunday school and church in the station wagon, thenreturn home for a big dinner, often with the grandparents, which took thelion’s share of the afternoon. We returned to church in the late afternoonfor youth groups followed by evening worship—where we learned almost everysong in the hymnal. Absolutely nothing interfered with that sacred schedule.We would never darken the door of a store; most of them, including the shoppingmall, were closed in any case. Later, when my high-school swimming team wouldoccasionally practice on Sunday night, I had to explain to my coach thatI would be in church with my family.

Today, with a family of my own, we still attend Sunday school and worshipfaithfully every Sunday morning, but the Lord’s Day is just not the same.We rarely have a big leisurely dinner, as our extended family lives at adistance. Nor do we return to church in the evening, as many churches haveaxed Sunday-evening worship services. So I am left with teaching my kidsthe classic hymns of faith in the family room. On occasion we patronize acommercial establishment—few stores are closed on Sundays now—and at timeswe have allowed sporting events for our three children to crowd the day.

While some might be tempted to say my childhood Sundays were too restrictiveand that my family today has simply adjusted to the frantic realities ofthe 1990s, I think our weakened observance of the Sabbath is not unrelatedto the weakened character of today’s Christians, including yours truly. Granted,evangelicals are more educated and sophisticated than they were a generationago, but something is clearly missing in the fabric of our lives.

A similar observation represents the core of PracticingOur Faith, a collection of essays that seeks to recover not just theLord’s Day, but 11 other spiritual disciplines and ancient practices of thechurch that, when “woven together, suggest the patterns of a faithful Christianway of life for our time.” Edited by Dorothy Bass, an Indiana clergywomanof the United Church of Christ who grew up a Presbyterian in my hometown,the book addresses primarily a mainline rather than an evangelical audience.Nevertheless, by focusing on the connection between faith and practice, Bass’sLilly Endowment-funded project highlights the anomaly of professing Christians,evangelicals included, whose lives differ very little in form and practicefrom those of their pagan neighbors.

The book does a fair job reflecting upon and suggesting ways to recover thevisible expressions of the Christian life—neglected habits such as practicinghospitality, singing hymns, and living in moderation. Bass’s essay, “PracticingSabbath” (CT, Sept. 1, 1997, p. 38), is especially welcome, arguing that honoring the Sabbath makes for good Christiansand good societies. Amy Plantinga Pauw’s chapter, “Dying Well,” is equallystrong, exploring ways “the Christian community can offer a depth of spiritualand practical support for the sorrowing that the funeral home can never match.”

Two factors, however, may limit the book’s ability to deliver on its promise.While the volume boasts religious and ethnic “diversity,” eight of the thirteencontributors represent all but one of the Seven Sisters of the mainline;evangelical representation is sparse. The more serious weakness is the lackof a solid theological basis that would give the essays their needed punch.The book oozes with vague and sentimental affirmations of Christian doctrinethat will offend no one, as reflected in a chapter on forgiveness that strugglesto talk about sin, grace, and redemption in clear biblical categories. Attimes the book is preoccupied with the merely trendy, not to say bizarre;the lead essay, “Honoring the Body,” encourages mothers to help daughterscome to terms with their bodies by turning baths into baptismal re-enactments.

So while Practicing Our Faith raises important questions, Bass providesammunition for another midwestern historian with mainline credentials, ThomasReeves, whose The Empty Church looks at the challenges to the Christianfaith at the end of the twentieth century from a different, yet related,angle. Reeves, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin known forhis probing books on Sen. Joseph McCarthy and President John F. Kennedy,is more concerned with the decline of orthodoxy than orthopraxy in the mainline.This respected scholar and—at the time he was writing The EmptyChurch—active Episcopal layman confirms what evangelicals, from GreshamMachen to Alister McGrath, have contended about the mainline for decades.

Lacking experience in church politics as a clergyman, however, Reeves’sprescriptions for the dying patient seem a bit na. He stresses theimportance of recovering “the truths of the ancient faith” and training clergy“to preach and live them,” calling for the creation of new seminaries tobypass denominational seminaries captivated by “radical feminists, politicalactivists, [and] multicultural relativists.” Yet this has been the conservativestrategy for at least three generations—from the founding of Westminsterin 1929, Fuller in 1947, and Gordon-Conwell in 1969—and the results in termsof mainline reform have been marginal at best.

Indeed, since completing The Empty Church (first published in thefall of 1996), Reeves himself has come to despair over the prospects forreform within the mainline. Shortly after Episcopalians held their seventy-secondgeneral convention in Philadelphia in July of this year, Reeves joined theRoman Catholic Church.

In retrospect, Reeves’s book offers clues that he was on the road to Rome.As much as he commends evangelicals in these pages, he does not believe thatthey offer compelling alternatives for conservative mainliners. He isparticularly scornful in dismissing the theory that evangelical growth inrecent years is primarily due to mainline defections: “Warehouselike buildings,sobbing pop gospel soloists, garish theatrics, shouting preachers, and boisterousworshippers,” Reeves writes, “cannot appeal to many of us” who value “dignity,reverence, beauty, learning, tradition, and a sense of the numinous.”

Does The Empty Church hold lessons still for orthodoxbelievers—mainline and evangelical—who are not inclined to follow Reeves’sexample? Yes. Across the board, Reeves contends, American believers maintaina superficial Christianity that allows them to pick and choose the termsof faith, living practically the same way as those who claim no faith atall. “Christianity in modern America is, in large part, innocuous,” he writes.“It tends to be easy, upbeat, convenient, and compatible. It does not requirea zeal for souls, a fear as well as love of God.”

How to move from a shallow, cultural Christianity to a serious faith thataffects the everyday life of here and now is indeed the challenge of ourtime. Perhaps evangelicals might begin with the recognition of the vitalconnection Saint Paul draws in Titus 2 between sound behavior and sound doctrine,drawing upon the orthopraxy of Dorothy Bass without neglecting the orthodoxyof Thomas Reeves. Since the time of Israel, God has demanded from his peoplea pattern of daily life that sets them apart from unbelievers. Where weaktheology has led to a neglect of these practices in the mainline community,evangelicals are today threatened by the process in reverse. Only as evangelicalsgive as much attention to what they do as what they believe can they expectto remain a holy people set apart for the Lord.

Short NoticesThe Early Church Fathers: Their Writings and Teachingson CD-ROM ($99.95, Segen Corporation,www.segen.com).

Want to know what the Fathers said about the “Mother of God”? After a recentNewsweek article about Mary, we did. Using the review copy of thisCD-ROM, we located all 431 references toMary in the first nine volumes of the Eerdmans edition of the Ante-NiceneFathers in an instant. (It took five hours to read all those passages.)The full 37-volume set will be released in thirds, and purchasers of thisfirst CD-ROM will receive upgrades for $10.

Copyright © 1997 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christianity Today magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mailcteditor@christianitytoday.com.

REAL REPENTANCERepentance is not a popular word these days, but I believe that any of us recognize it when it strikes us in the gut. Repentance is coming to our senses, seeing, suddenly, what we’ve done that we might not have done, or recognizeing … that the problem is not in what we do but in what we become.

—Kathleen Norris inThe Cloister Walk

ICONS OF HUMANITYThere is something wonderful about a beaten-up heavily marked, tattered Bible. Madeleine Delbrel, the French Catholic activist who lived a little more than a generation ago, stuffed her Bible with snapshots, clippings, ticket stubs, postcards and other detritus to remind her that she was praying in the world of people and events. She called these scraps “icons of humanity” that prompted one to celebrate the “liturgy of life.”

—Lawrence S. Cunningham inAmerica, “Praying the Psalms”

TAINTED SPIRITUALITYWhen you look at our history, it is no wonder that spirituality is so often treated with suspicion, and not infrrequently with outright hostility. For in actual practice spirituality very often develops into neurosis, degenerates into selfishness, becomes pretentious, turns violent. How does this happen? The short answer is that it happens when we step outside the Gospel story and take ourselves as the basic and authoritative text for our spirituality; we begin exegeting ourselves as a sacred text … True spirituality, Christian spirituality, takes attention off of ourselves and focuses it on another, on Jesus.

—Eugene H. Peterson inSubversive Spirituality

GREATER POWERThe longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance, and the harder it is to believe that this omnipotent factor in human affairs arises simply from the blind interplay of events. Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence, seem to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.

—Winston Churchill inWinston S. Churchil: Thoughts and Adventures

HOME MISSION FIELDWe have a real problem in this country when it comes to values. We have become the kind of societies that civilized countries used to send missionaries to.

—William Bennett, interviewed on theMacNeil-Lehrer News Hour

SECRET FEARA closed mind is a sign of hidden doubt.

—Harold DeWold inTheology of the Living Church

PEACE EFFECTS PEACEFirst put yourself at peace, and then you may the better make others be at peace. A peaceful and patient man is of more profit to himself and to others, too, than a learned man who has no peace.

—Thomas a Kempis inThe Imitation of Christ

WHAT SIN ISN’TMany people confuse the conviction of sin with such feelings as inferiority, lack of self-confidence and so on. Yet whoever observes people closely can see that these feeling and the conviction of sin are not only different from each other but incertain regards are mutually exclusive.

A diffuse and vague guilt feeling kills the personality, whereas the conviction of sin gives life to the personality. The former depends on people, on public opinion, while the latter depends on God.

—Paul Tournier inEscape from Loneliness

WHO’S MASTER?Whatever injury wicked men-in-power inflict upon good men is to regarded … as a test for the good man’s virtues. Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For, a wicked man serves not just one master, but, what’s worse, as many masters as he has vices. For, it is in reference to vice that the Holy Scripture says: “For by whom a man is overcome, of the same also he is the slave” (2 Peter 2:19).

—Saint Augustine inThe City of God

HEALING IN WEAKNESSWe live in a world full of people struggling to be, or at least to appear strong, in order not to be weak; and we follow a gospel which says that when I am weak, then I am strong. And this gospel is the only thing that brings healing.

—N.T. Wright inFor All God’s Worth

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

“As the years passed by, the desire became a dream, the dream became a need, the need became an obsession, the obsession became a fantasy, and the fantasy became a delusion,” admitted John G. Bennett, Jr., just prior to his September sentencing in a Philadelphia courtroom.

As founder of the Foundation for New Era Philanthropy, Bennett persuasively convinced about 500 charities to invest $354 million in hopes of having anonymous benefactors match their gifts dollar for dollar. But New Era from its earliest days was in reality a pyramid scheme, defrauding individual donors and charities alike.

Those people and charities are of starkly differing opinions about New Era and Bennett, who told friends his life’s purpose was “changing the world for the glory of God.”

Victim-impact letters, on file with the court, provide a glimpse at how donors and nonprofit leaders view Bennett. Bruce Johnson of Leighton Ford Ministries wrote that donor loss of trust and increased skepticism has been “tremendous.” Yet William E. Simon, the former Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and a New Era donor, said, “He believed he could match the funds he raised. I hope … he will be given the opportunity to start anew.”

C. Raymond van Pletsen, Bennett’s pastor, wrote to the court, “I am convinced he is not a con man. The elders of our church have heard Jack’s confession, and as far as any human being can measure such things, believe that Jack is truly repentant.”

Judge Edmund V. Ludwig, under federal guidelines, could have sentenced Bennett to 24 years in prison. But the judge said he took into account Bennett’s charitable activity before 1989 as well as evidence that Bennett had been experiencing significant personality disorders.

Bennett’s wife, Joyce, in a statement to the court, called her husband a “good Samaritan.” She said, “His mother often spoke of her motto: ‘If there is any good I can do for someone, let me do it now, for I may not pass this way again.’ “

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

A church not known for tracts or tel-evangelism is discovering a renewed commitment to spreading the gospel message, thanks partly to the fervor of recent converts from evangelical Protestantism.

Eastern Orthodoxy has a long history of bringing unbelievers into the Christian fold. As a reminder of Orthodoxy’s evangelistic heritage, Metropolitan Theodosius of Syosset, New York, speaking at the North American Orthodox Conference on Missions and Evangelism last month in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, pointed to Saint Innocent of Alaska, who crossed the Bering Strait in the early 1800s to bring the gospel to Native Americans.

As new converts turned away from shamanism and toward Christianity, missionaries built schools and churches, developed a written form of the native language, and encouraged intermarriage. Theodosius urged a renewed remembrance of Innocent, saying, “There has been a 200-year tradition of Orthodox evangelism in this country.”

In recent centuries, Orthodox evangelism elsewhere has been jeopardized by persecution within Communist countries or by militant Islamic groups. And in America, new Orthodox immigrants, grateful for safety and opportunity, often remained within their own ethnic enclaves.

“Up until recently, Orthodoxy has been the best-kept secret in America,” said Peter Gillquist, director of missions and evangelism for the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese. “Those days are over.” Gillquist has been a leader in the defection of evangelicals into Orthodox churches during the past decade.

Workshops throughout the week focused on practical motivational techniques, including “Selling Evangelism to a Reluctant Parish,” by John Reeves, and “Overcoming the World: Orthodox Evangelism in the Western Roman Empire,” by Michael Keiser.

Keiser emphasized the importance of transforming culture in effective missions work. “Capturing the Roman world for Christ took four to five hundred years and involved more than just getting people to accept baptism,” he said. “They not only focused on the process of Christian initiation, but also the transformation of society through worship and engaging the culture in which they lived, rather than running away from it.”

Frederica Mathewes-Green, author of Facing East: A Pilgrim’s Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy (Harper San Francisco, 1997), offered advice on practical evangelism.

“Choose one person and prayerfully seek an opportunity to share your witness,” Mathewes-Green suggested. “Don’t worry if your story seems ordinary; that’s the most useful kind.” She challenged attendees to be courageous in presenting the gospel to a fallen world that could respond with derision, apathy, or persecution.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Officials of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant group, have completed the most comprehensive restructuring in the denomination’s 152-year history.

In 1995, messengers to the SBC’s annual meeting approved the Covenant for a New Century, which mandated a massive bureaucratic overhaul and reduced the number of agencies from 19 to 12.

Most visibly, the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB)—a new entity with a $100 million annual budget—came into being from the merger of three former agencies: the Home Mission Board (HMB), the Radio-Television Commission (RTVC), and the Brotherhood Commission. Robert E. Reccord, NAMB president, came to the agency as pastor of First Baptist Church in Norfolk, Virginia.

Three SBC entities—the Stewardship Commission, the Historical Commission, and the Education Commission—have been eliminated and their assignments moved to other agencies. The Southern Baptist Foundation, once a separate entity, has become a subsidiary corporation of the SBC Executive Committee.

Two agencies have been renamed: The Foreign Mission Board is now the International Mission Board, and the Christian Life Commission is the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.

The restructuring has resulted in the elimination of more than 200 staff positions among affected agencies. The highest-ranking SBC leaders affected include:

—Larry Lewis, who retired as HMB president, became national facilitator for Celebrate Jesus 2000.

—James D. Williams, former Brotherhood Commission president, is now executive director of the Memphis-based Baptist Medical-Dental Fellowship.

—Jack Johnson, former RTVC president, is a special assistant to NAMB’s Reccord.

—Steve Carleton, former executive director of the Education Commission, now is on the staff of a private medical-education foundation in Oklahoma City.

—Slayden Yarbrough, former interim executive director of the Historical Commission, is the new executive director of the independent Southern Baptist Historical Society.

“The new structure is in place and functioning,” says David Hankins, vice president for convention policy at the SBC Executive Committee in Nashville. “What it will produce in ministry results is yet to be seen, but we are optimistic.”

SBC officials have estimated the restructuring will produce a net savings of between $34 million and $41 million in the next five years.

“Southern Baptists have become more intentional in what they want to do,” Hankins says of the need to restructure. “It will position us to be at our best in the twenty-first century and has put every bit of our emphasis on international and North American missions, theological education, and moral and religious liberty concerns.”

Two other SBC agencies—the Baptist Sunday School Board and the Annuity Board—generate virtually all their own funds, though their board members are elected by SBC messengers. Trustees of the Sunday School Board last month recommended that the agency be renamed LifeWay Christian Resources.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Pro-life activists have found success in getting state legislatures to ban partial-birth abortions, even though court challenges may keep some of the legislation from being enforced.

As President Clinton is poised to veto a congressional partial-birth abortion ban for the second consecutive year (CT, July 14, 1997, p. 70), 14 states have enacted bans this year that resemble the language of a Michigan law passed last year. U.S. District Court Judge Gerald Rosen ruled that law unconstitutional in July, saying the Michigan legislation defined the banned procedure so broadly that it placed an “undue burden” on women seeking abortions by other methods.

Louise Melling, who argued the case for the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, believes the ruling is a “death knell” for the nationwide movement banning the late-term abortion procedure.

But National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson disagrees. “I don’t think it’s going to have that much weight,” he says. “It’s not a precedent in any binding sense.”

State lawmakers have attempted to align proposed bans with the federal bill, which, in the latest version, narrowed the definition of the controversial procedure to win the endorsem*nt of the American Medical Association. The Senate passed the ban, but it was three votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override Clinton’s expected veto.

The Michigan ruling is the first that permanently invalidates a state ban on partial-birth abortion, but it may be appealed. Courts have temporarily blocked bans in at least nine other states. Johnson insists that backers of the Michigan law did not present their best case—the argument upon which the proposed federal ban is based.

“The position of the Congress is that this is a premature infant—almost entirely delivered alive—and that the government can step in at that point at least and protect the child,” he says. “The Supreme Court has never said otherwise. They would actually have to extend Roe v. Wade in order to cover [partial-birth abortion].”

STATE-LEVEL TRIUMPHS: Highly publicized debate on the federal level has partly obscured the state-level legislative success, which may be greater than at any time since Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.

Partial-birth-abortion legislation has been introduced in at least 38 states and considered in at least 5 others. Bans have passed this year in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Tennessee.

The governors of Florida, Missouri, New Jersey, and Illinois vetoed bans passed by their legislatures. An Illinois ban is pending approval of changes made by Gov. Jim Edgar. Missouri’s Senate failed to override Gov. Mel Carnahan’s veto by one vote, but Carnahan promised to consider a bill in the next session that would include a health exception for the mother. The governor spent $60,000 of his own campaign money to buy full-page newspaper ads that explained his reason for the veto.

Polls around the country indicate at least a two-thirds majority favor banning partial-birth abortion with an exception for a mother whose life is in danger.

In the procedure, usually performed in the twentieth to twenty-sixth week of pregnancy, the fetal brain is vacuumed out of the skull to allow the abortion to be completed with fewer complications to the mother.

“State legislators are falling all over themselves to be on the right side of this issue,” says Michael Schwartz, executive director of the Congressional Family Caucus. “It is definitely to the political advantage of anyone, without regard to his or her position on the general question of whether abortion should be legal.”

HEALTH EXEMPTION: A key legislative point is insistence by abortion-rights lobbyists that an exception be made for the health of the mother.

Pro-life lawmakers say this is a huge loophole that permits partial-birth abortions for “emotional well-being” or “depression.” Utah passed a law with that exception, which Johnson calls a “phony ban.”

In Oklahoma, a proposed ban passed the House but failed in the Senate. “Pro-choice people here insisted on the health-of-the-mother language to be included in the legislation, which really made the legislation on a par with what’s already law,” says Linda Morgan Clark, executive director of the Oklahoma affiliate of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

“These kinds of laws are being used for political purposes,” Clark maintains. “They’re not being used to save lives or to make sure that more children come into the world. Quite frankly, they’re being used to raise money by the anti-choice movement and to keep a fire burning all the time.”

“We have never suggested that the partial-birth-abortion legislation is any sort of stopping point or panacea,” Johnson says. “Any time we have an opportunity to advance a policy that will save a substantial number of lives, we think it’s worthwhile, as long as we’re not doing it in such a way that precludes future progress.”

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Henry J. Lyons, the embattled president of the nation’s largest predominantly African-American denomination, managed to survive a raucous September annual session in Denver in which dissident members seized the convention floor and tried to force him out.

After five days of political maneuvering by both Lyons and his critics, most members of the National Baptist Convention USA still wanted the St. Petersburg, Florida, pastor as their leader.

He remains the head of the 8 million-member denomination despite continued reports that he misused church funds and had questionable relationships with women.

“I am looking for healing,” Lyons said after a vote of forgiveness by the delegates—the fourth such vote in three days. “The people have spoken, and they spoke in a great way.”

MARITAL STRIFE: Lyons’s struggles began on July 6, when his wife, Deborah, allegedly set a fire that damaged a $700,000 waterfront home in Tierra Verde, near St. Petersburg (CT, Sept. 1, 1997, p. 94). Lyons owns the home with Bernice V. Edwards, a Milwaukee woman once convicted of embezzling $60,000 from a school for at-risk students. Lyons has said Edwards is a friend and former convention employee.

Initially, Deborah Lyons told police she started the blaze in a fit of jealousy after learning that her husband and Edwards own the house together. She later changed her story, saying the fire started accidentally when she dropped a lighted cigarette.

Records showed that Lyons and Edwards had been negotiating to buy a $925,000 mansion in Charlotte, North Carolina. Edwards and Lyons’s St. Petersburg church had been listed as the owners of a $135,000 Mercedes-Benz. And Lyons and Edwards reportedly bought a $36,200 diamond ring from a St. Petersburg jewelry store. The ring had been purchased with a check written on the Baptist Builder Fund, an account not listed in the convention’s financial audit.

The accusations intensified during the summer. Lyons indicated on his marriage license to third wife Deborah that he had not been wed before. Yet Patricia Demons says she married Lyons in 1966 and endured three years of physical abuse. In 1969, Lyons married Camilla Smith, a member of his church’s youth group, six weeks after his divorce from his first wife. The second marriage lasted three years.

By August, Florida and U.S. government officials began conducting criminal investigations of Lyons. A National Baptist Convention USA investigative committee also started a probe.

In the week before the Denver annual session, Lyons, 55, tried to answer the allegations. He called Edwards a “family friend” with whom he had no romantic relationship. He said he had maintained the lavish lifestyle by accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions on business deals he made on behalf of the convention. In some cases, he took a 75 percent cut, which he called a mistake.

SUPPORTERS RALLY: Lyons, elected to a five-year term as president in 1994, arrived at the annual session looking exhausted and considerably thinner than he had been two months earlier. Yet he obviously continued to have the support of the convention leaders, most of whom he had appointed.

Acen L. Phillips of Denver, a convention vice president, said Lyons merely needed to express his sorrow and all would be forgiven.

“The only thing that puts him in jeopardy … is if he doesn’t repent,” Phillips said.

As the annual session began, the investigative committee filed a preliminary report saying that Lyons had opened accounts without authorization and engaged in business deals not covered by convention rules. Though the committee said it still had much work to do, the convention’s executive committee—made up mostly of Lyons appointees—gave him an 87-to-17 vote of confidence. Two members of the investigative committee immediately quit in protest.

Soon after the convention opened, Lyons stood before several thousand delegates and apologized. “I have truly sought God’s forgiveness,” he said. Delegates assembled at the Colorado Convention Center voted overwhelmingly to support him. They cast a similar ballot the next day.

DISSIDENTS PROTEST: By the third day of the five-day meeting, Lyons’s opponents made a dramatic move to unseat him. During the morning’s business, 150 dissident ministers stormed the stage, pumping their fists and chanting, “Let the people speak!” After several minutes, Lyons agreed to let seven dissidents have the microphone, but only after assurances that seven of his supporters could speak and after security guards cleared reporters from the room.

The dissidents, led by W. Franklyn Richardson of New York, urged delegates to oust Lyons, saying he had dirtied the convention’s reputation and jeopardized its federal tax exemption.

But Lyons emerged the clear winner in a delegate vote. “The convention decided to not abandon its president in a time of crisis,” Richardson said. “The convention forgave its president.”

Lyons’s troubles are not over. State and federal authorities continue their investigations. And a week after the annual session ended, another charge emerged: Last year the Anti-Defamation League and National Urban League raised $244,500 to aid burned-out black churches and gave Lyons the money. But the seven churches involved announced in September that only $30,000 had been received, even though Lyons said he distributed the money. Afterwards, Lyons’s attorney sent a check for the remaining $214,500.

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In recent years, Christians from a variety of denominations who are active in peacemaking and reconciliation ministries have started to share resources to enhance the growing reconciliation movement. About 300 Christians from around the world, including hot spots such as Rwanda, Croatia, and Northern Ireland, gathered for Reconciliation ’97, held at Coventry Cathedral in England. Raleigh Washington, an African-American Promise Keepers leader from Chicago, told the group, “Change will only happen as we come together as one. I have a new dream that churches around the world will come together in unifying love.”

Former South African President F. W. De Klerk, whose government supported the apartheid system, shows how far reconciliation efforts have come in the 1990s. De Klerk appealed to the victims of discriminatory policies to “find it in their hearts to forgive us.” De Klerk said most Christians have failed to carry out Jesus’ commandment of forgiveness. “Until we truly forgive our enemies we carry within our hearts a bitterness, which can poison every other aspect of our lives.”

Johnson Philip Mlambo, a former Pan African Congress deputy who spent 20 years in prison with current South African President Nelson Mandela, experienced reconciliation firsthand. “It is important to me to be here, because some of the bad things that happened in our country happened in the name of religion,” Mlambo said. “This has deepened my commitment to the worth of the human being.”

The roots of the reconciliation ministry at the cathedral date to World War II when Nazi bombs caused heavy damage. During the cathedral’s restoration, nails were collected and wired together in the shape of a cross and sent to Christians in Germany as an act of friendship.

FRESH METHODS: As Christian leaders have examined the process of reconciliation, they have developed new techniques to bridge the divide between hostile groups, in part by identifying the underlying issues.

In Australia, for example, land use and ownership has long been a contentious issue between aboriginal and white Australians. Mal Garvin, director of Fusion Australia Ministries and AD2000 Australia, noted aboriginals are reflective of “wounded indigenous people all around the globe who’ve not yet been invited to the table. Until they are, world evangelization won’t happen.”

Likewise, Youth With a Mission England director Lynn Green reported how Reconciliation Walks throughout the Middle East (CT, Oct. 7, 1996, p. 90) are leading Christians and Muslims to re-examine the source of their conflicts.

“We’re taking the message of apology for the atrocities of the Crusades, where Christians are saying to Muslims, ‘I’m sorry for the misrepresentation of Jesus that happened 900 years ago.’ “

“We Christians have a terrible lot to be ashamed of on this continent, turning ideology into virtual religion,” Coventry Cathedral Canon Paul Oestreicher said. “The fall of communism has not meant the rise of Christianity.”

In studying the divisions between Protestants and Roman Catholics, David Porter, cofounder and director of Evangelical Contribution of Northern Ireland, came to realize, “There will not be real reconciliation unless there is deep repentance and forgiveness on both sides” (CT, Oct. 6, 1997, p. 74).

In many cases, reconciliation efforts by Christians are not instigated until violence and bloodshed have taken a toll. However, Peacemakers of Canada in Quebec is working to resolve ongoing political conflicts before things get out of hand. Rudy Pohl, director of the group, said, “We are heading into an unavoidable conflict in Canada that has all the marks of Northern Ireland.”

One issue debated among the leaders was how to move beyond rebuilding with bricks and mortar to rebuilding relationships between deeply divided groups. Antoine Rutayisire, a Rwandan team leader with African Enterprise, called Christians to persevere in their efforts. “We can rebuild houses and buildings, but if we don’t have healing and repentance, it’s not the same,” he said.

SECOND THOUGHTS? Although many leading Christian groups were represented at Reconciliation ’97, official Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) involvement had been withdrawn.

Initially, SBC sponsors supported the international gathering. However, with organizational shifts recently finalized (see p. 96) creating the North American Mission Board (NAMB), incoming board member William Streich advised leaders to reconsider their Reconciliation ’97 involvement and “to nullify a move in a very dangerous direction.”

In a memo, Streich expressed concern that “Southern Baptists are giving credibility to the teaching of the apostate Catholic church by its association with it in Coventry.” Streich’s memo cited a June SBC resolution on ecumenism that “such efforts not commit Southern Baptists to any organizational or long-term relationship which would risk compromise of historic distinctives or the unique witness of Southern Baptists in the world.”

Priest Frank Ruff, an advocate for improved Catholic/Baptist relations and a conference workshop leader, believes Streich represents a minority view. “At Southern Baptist conventions I hear all the time how most Baptists don’t want to be isolated,” he said.

Reid Hardin, conference organizer and a retired director of lay renewal for the SBC, said, “The problem too often has been that we only know each other by our theology rather than as people.”

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When Princess Diana died, I got a phone call from a television producer.“Can you appear on our show?” he asked. “We want you to explain how God couldpossibly allow such a terrible accident.”

I could not make the television appearance, but his question prompted meto dig out a file folder in which I have stashed notes of things for whichGod gets blamed:

—At the 1994 Winter Olympics, when speed skater Dan Jansen’s hand scraped the ice, causing him to lose the 500-meter race, his wife, Robin, cried out, “Why, God, again? God can’t be that cruel!”

—A young woman wrote James Dobson this letter: “Four years ago, I was dating a man and became pregnant. I was devastated! I asked God, ‘Why have You allowed this to happen to me?’ “

—In a professional bout, boxer Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini slammed his Korean opponent with a hard right, causing a massive cerebral hemorrhage. At a press conference after the Korean’s death, Mancini said, “Sometimes I wonder why God does the things he does.”

—Susan Smith, who pushed her two sons into a lake to drown, then blamed a black car-jacker for the deed, wrote in her official confession: “I dropped to the lowest point when I allowed my children to go down that ramp into the water without me. I took off running and screaming ‘Oh God! Oh God, no! What have I done? Why did you let this happen?'”

Exactly what role did God play in a speed skater losing control on a turnor a teenage couple losing control in a back seat, not to mention the lethaleffect of a boxer’s punch or a mother’s premeditated act of violence? Andas for Princess Di’s accident, could it have had something to do with a drunkdriver going 85 mph in a narrow tunnel?

I once watched a television interview with a famous Hollywood actress whoselover had rolled off a yacht in a drunken stupor and drowned. The actress,who probably had not thought about God in months, looked at the camera, herlovely face contorted by grief, and asked, bizarrely, “How could a lovingGod let this happen?” Perhaps something similar lay behind the televisionproducer’s question. Pain, “God’s megaphone” in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, shoutsso loudly that we cannot ignore it. Exposed as frail and mortal, we lashout against someone who is not: God.

Following the footsteps (hoofprints?) of Screwtape, I havetried looking at current events from a more diabolical point of view. Insteadof asking, “How could God possibly allow this to happen?” I ask, “How couldSatan possibly allow it?” So viewed, even the tragic death of Princess Dianatakes on a different cast.

At a time of grief and shock and mourning, the secular United Kingdom, wherebarely one person in 20 attends church regularly, had nowhere else to turnbut to church. Where else can any of us take our grief and find a ray ofhope? Over two billion people worldwide, more than Billy Graham has preachedto in his lifetime, tuned in to watch a magnificent Anglican service. Celebritieswho have not attended church since childhood crowded in the door.

Consider a more fundamental question: “How could Satan allow Diana to squanderher life as she did?” Like other princesses, she could have spent her daysat the roulette tables in Monaco. Instead, she cradled AIDS babies in London,embraced leprosy patients in Africa and amputees in Bosnia, sat and visitedwith Mother Teresa in Calcutta.

(Ah, yes, that other funeral one week later: How could Satan allow the lifeof Mother Teresa? She had a fine career, doing little damage, teaching geographyto students at an elite school for wealthy Brahmins. However did she slipaway to devote herself to the destitute? What a tragedy for Screwtape’s cause!Nor could hell rejoice in her death when her adopted nation, 97 percentnon-Christian, decided to honor her with a state funeral.)

I know nothing of Princess Diana’s personal faith, but because of mycollaborations with surgeon Paul Brand, I do know of the great good she didfor the cause of leprosy. The princess was patroness of the Leprosy Mission,which ministers to the world’s 12 million victims of leprosy. Most of themedical advances in leprosy have come from Christian missionaries, oftenthe only ones willing to work with the afflicted. Gradually these faithfulservants solved leprosy’s riddles, exposed its myths, and refined effectivetreatments. Yet leprosy rarely attracted much media attention until PrincessDiana.

Surely Screwtape cannot be pleased that memorial gifts for the princess willgo to help sufferers from two terrible plagues, AIDS and leprosy, as wellas to benefit an organization that paints red crosses on its ambulances.

Many a preacher and newscaster have noted the irony of two of the world’smost famous women dying within a few days of each other. Most such reportsfocus on their differences. Looking back, what strikes me is a profoundsimilarity: The young, tall, beautiful princess with a new outfit for everyoccasion and the old, short, homely nun who wore the same outfit on everyoccasion are both remembered primarily for their compassion for the neglectedand despised. How could Screwtape possibly allow such a tragedy?

Copyright © 1997 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.