Page 4385 – Christianity Today (2024)

Columbine’s CrossI was moved by Wendy Murray Zoba’s article “Do You Believe in God?” [Oct. 4] and thought it was well-thought out and powerful. But at the most crucial point, she seemed to take the position that we don’t know the answers. I write of her statement, “whether the deeds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold will be covered by the ‘offense of the Cross’ is beyond human ability to know.”

This matter would be “beyond human ability to know” if it weren’t for the fact that God has already told us. Does not the Scripture make it very clear that repentance and faith are requirements? Is there no objective standard by which God will judge and a timing that is acceptable to call upon him? By ignoring this issue, Zoba was unable to offer real hope.

Zoba wrote of her anticipation that this generation of Christian young people is being galvanized to make a difference. May they be galvanized around the truth—repentance, faith, compassion, hope now.

Joanna Lekberg
Whiteland, Ind.

In tearing down the crosses dedicated to the Columbine killers, Brian Rohrbough was restoring moral clarity to a situation badly in need of it. Greg Zanis has a lot of nerve to be “outraged” at the “defiling” of his crosses. It was he who defiled the “sacred ground” by honoring the evil monsters that made the crosses necessary.

Edward Hofmeister
Coronado, Calif.

Seldom am I riveted by a piece like I was this one. Unfortunately these horrific deeds ended in a way so that we will never know what was in these two boys’ hearts. But if they had lived and God can’t forgive them, then he cannot forgive you and me. The grace of the Cross is unfair in how it treats everyone. And thank God it is! This tragedy is a testimony that God can work in anything for our good. Even in evil things, God is not overpowered.

Jeffery A. Raker
Fostoria, Ohio

The article on Columbine was heartbreaking. I was struck by Rohrbough’s attitude that the two boys were not victims and did not deserve crosses. The boys were victims of Satan. Satan used them for his purposes and then destroyed them along with the others. Christ died for the sins of the whole world.

Pat Williamson
Chillicothe, Ohio

It is a stretch to suggest that the tragedy has “changed America.” The only visible signs of change are the crass marketing of Cassie Bernall’s last words in Christian bookstores and the increase in explicit sexual content in the fall TV shows. American culture is continuing pretty much as usual.

David John Seel, Jr., Ph.D.
Montreat, N.C.

To Bear or Not to BearI appreciated the editorial “In Guns We Trust” [Oct. 4] for presenting a godlier perspective on the issue of gun control. However, I must respond to the statement that “[an evil person is] someone to be resisted.” Scripture is crystal clear: “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

No Christian who trusts God’s power can do other than live in obedience to these difficult words. For a Christian, whatever is designed to take life must be utterly rejected. Anything less is tantamount to the Crusades or abortion.

Dyanna Black
Willard, Mo.

People who “need” guns for self-defense understand neither the commandment nor Jesus’ teaching. They don’t need guns; they need Bible study. The gun lobby and the ever-increasing use of guns at personal instigation is a worsening curse on our society.

Dr. Karl E. Moyer
Lancaster, Pa.

Advocates of gun control want to take us back to pre-A.D. 323 when oppression, slavery, and martyrdom of Christians for entertainment was common. I respectfully reject such practices and will oppose it with lethal power if necessary.

I’m a debtor to those who gave their all to purchase these precious rights which today we see being torn to pieces and trampled underfoot. Have those who died at Valley Forge, Yorktown, Gettysburg, and the many other places died in vain?

Jim Glover
Heber Springs, Ark

Capitalism RedeemedIt was no surprise to learn Eric Miller has retreated into academia where he can continue to whine about the evils of consumerism, unscathed by the evil world outside. If he prefers to stay where he is, he would do well to junk his rusty Toyota and buy a horse and buggy from an enterprising Amish businessman; then he could proudly park at the front of the lot.

Will Miller
Penn Valley, Calif.

In the article “Keeping Up with the Amish” [Oct. 4], the phrases “corporate capitalism” and “consumer capitalism” pop up again. I have a master’s degree in economics and have read a great deal on the subject, yet I have never found these terms in any scholarly work.

Miller declares capitalism to be a great evil, but what is his alternative? Marxism, or its anemic twin, socialism? Is it the Amish? By the standards of India and China, the Amish are obscenely materialistic. How much do the Amish give to alleviate poverty, improve education, and heal the sick in countries such as India?

Roger D. McKinney
Broken Arrow, Okla

Our Crooning Bad BoyCheers on a job well done casting light on the real Pat Boone [“Why Pat Boone Went ‘Bad,’ ” Oct. 4]. You may love the leathers or you may like him to lose them, but the true mettle of this man is his courageous Christian compassion. Last August Pat rode his Harley 200 miles in driving wind and rain on our Mercy Ride for Kosovo Refugees, donating his time and airfare, to reach out to the “least of these.” Pat does more charity events for more organizations than anyone I know, co-founding Mercy Corps International 20 years ago. Rock on, Pat!

Dan O’Neill, President
Mercy Corps International
Portland, Oreg.

Nowhere in Scripture do I find the Church called to be entertainment.

Far too many in today’s body of Christ seem to have lost faith in the substance, beauty, truth and power of the gospel alone to attract the lost. They have, instead, decided to “help God sell it” by slick packaging, gimmicks, lighting and audio technology, costuming, lavish and costly productions, and passing fads and fashions that tickle the eye and ear. Can you imagine Christ in the studded collar of his day? Did he posture in lavish robes in order to “win” Caesar?

We need to get self out of the way and let the Holy Spirit do His work through us, not in spite of us.

Kathleen V. Nelson
Kingston, Wash.

Can the Church Say No?Regarding the forum on hom*osexuality, “Just Saying ‘No’ Is Not Enough” [Oct. 4]: I am glad you referred to the four panelists as “Christian thinkers” and not “Bible scholars.” Van Leeuwen said in the forum that she wouldn’t know what to do if a lesbian couple wanted to join her church. First Corinthians 5 makes it clear that such a couple is not to be regarded as members of the Church of Christ.

J. Michael Cobb
Chicago, Ill.

Christians and DivorceProfessor Burge answers the question, “You’re Divorced—Can You Remarry?” [Directions, Oct. 4] with the traditionally conservative, “the innocent partner is free to remarry.” This plausible but misleading wisdom, coupled with its loose application by churches, may be one of the reasons why the divorce rate among evangelical Christians is the same as that in the general population.

F. Eugene Guest
Valley Cottage, N.Y.

Burge quotes I Corinthians 7 as Paul “saying that husbands and wives are not permitted to leave each other but should work toward reconciliation.” The chapter says nothing about working toward reconciliation at all, but rather that a woman must not separate from her husband, but if she does she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. Paul precedes this statement saying that the command comes not from him, but from the Lord.

While an innocent party is not bound to re main in an adulterous marriage, he or she is bound by God’s command not to remarry as long as the other spouse lives. (This is precisely why David had Bathsheba’s husband killed rather than recommending divorce.)

Greg Richter
Gardendale, Ala.

ClarificationDouglas Brouwer’s review of Garry Wills’s Saint Augustine [Books, Oct. 4] incorrectly places Augustine’s death in 417 instead of the correct date of 430. If the error was Wills’s, he should be even more amazed at Augustine’s productivity.

Steve Oldham
Moundsview, Minn.

Susannah‘s WoesAs a born-again Christian, I would love to attend Lauren F. Winner’s church. It would appear, from her rather narrow reading of Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susannah that she has never met a Christian who acted in a hypocritical, sanctimonious, or other wise unchristian manner. The Reverend Olin Blitch, whom we first meet as a rather oily type, actually becomes a true Christian by the end of the opera; having seduced Susannah and found her a virgin, he sees not only that she has been falsely accused, but recognizes and repents of his own sin as well. Winner’s conclusion that Floyd is branding Christians as hypocrites with mob mentalities, with the unsaved being the only moral people, is erroneous.

Instead of condemning great examples of American art like Susannah, The Crucible, and Inherit the Wind, why don’t we concentrate on trying to live as true Christians, so that no artist—good or bad—can ever truthfully portray us as self-righteous hypocrites again?

Lou Santacroce
Producer and host of “At the Opera,” heard weekly on National Public Radio
Laurel, Md.

I appreciated your series of articles on whether the Religious Right has ceased to be relevant. The most striking point came from Don Eberly’s article, “We’re Fighting the Wrong Battle,” where he says that “our crisis is cultural.” This should lead to a call for Christians to become the best lawyers, doctors, writers, scientists, moviemakers, and educators the world has ever seen. In this way, we can truly challenge the culture with the relevance of our message.

Bill Clark
Belleville, Ontario
Canada

The right of involvement in leadership selection and governmental process is a precious, blood-bought opportunity to wield influence for the betterment of the nation. To be uninvolved is to act irrationally and, I suspect, unspiritually.

H. Edward Rowe, Th.M., D.D.
Las Vegas, Nev.

Amazing GraceRoger Olson’s article “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Arminian,” also in the September 6 issue, evoked several letters of gratitude from people who appreciated his irenic and balanced presentation. Michael Andrus of Manchester, Missouri, wrote: “The Bible itself is amazingly balanced between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility,” while Frank Nelson, of Brook field, Wisconsin, noted, “It really doesn’t seem to make any practical difference except to theologians.”

I would rather fellowship with a warm Arminian than with a cold Calvinist, and surely regenerate Calvinists “need” regenerate Arminians as members of the Body of Christ. But we certainly don’t need Arminian “theology,” with its pitiful Christ standing at the door of arrogant sinners’ hearts, begging for entrance but helpless and failing in most cases.

Terry Rayburn
Clarksville, Tenn.

Educational ChoiceYour editorial “Stay in School” [Sept. 6, 1999] seems to be a radical shift from your editorial point of view a school generation ago. In “Values in the Public Schools: A Prerequisite to Teaching” (April 10, 1981), Christianity Today editorialized that no school can be “value free” and that the only way parents could secure a consistent Christian “world-and-life view” was to send their children to the private Christian school. What positive changes in American public education over the past 18 years caused your editorial board to make this 180-degree philosophical shift?

If all Americans who claim to be born again sent their children to Christian schools, there would not be enough room. But the thousands of Americans who do make that choice willingly subject themselves to “double taxation” as they continue to support government education by paying taxes while bearing the full cost of their children’s educational expense.

At the same time, educational choice is nonexistent for countless Americans; they simply cannot afford the cost (tuition) of an educational alternative.

The proposal by some for a mass exodus by Christians from public schools is inappropriate. If we are going to solve this dilemma, it will call for new kinds of thinking and innovative action to help families exercise choice—particularly the ability to choose schooling whose aim is to integrate a Christian world-view with the rigors of academia and the overall school curriculum.

Ken Smitherman,
President and CEO, Association of Christian Schools International
Colorado Springs, Colo.

Our editorial in 1991 observed that ” … evangelical Christians have turned increasingly to private Christian schools. In the long run, we believe this is the best solution to the problem.”

The same editorial added: “And even if they place their own children in private schools, evangelicals dare not isolate themselves from their fellow citizens by deserting public education.”

Both editorials recognize the challenges of sending Christian children to public schools, and that this decision rests with parents. We feel our editorial of 1999 complements and updates the 1991 editorial. —Eds.

Brief letters are welcome. They may be edited for space and clarity and must include the writer’s name and address if intended for publication. Due to the volume of mail, we can not respond personally to individual letters. Write to Eutychus, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, 465 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, IL 60188; fax: 630/260-0114. E-mail: cteditor@christianitytoday.com.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Southern Baptists, whose 1996 Resolution on Jewish Evangelism provoked anger and charges of anti-Semitism, are once again at the center of a controversy over whether Jews may come to God only through Christ.

The recent protests against the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) began after the denomination’s International Mission Board published a booklet in September titled Days of Awe: Prayer for Jews. “The Bible is clear in giving Christ’s followers guidance regarding the necessity of sharing the gospel with the Jews,” the booklet states, urging special prayers during the first 10 days of the Jewish calendar, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur.

The prayer guides have prompted heated responses from the American Jewish community. “It is pure arrogance for any one religion to assume that they hold the truth,” says Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “The call to prayer among Southern Baptists is doubly offensive and disrespectful in light of the High Holidays.”

In a related event, a summer advertising campaign by Jews for Jesus also sparked public ire. The Internet search engine Lycos decided not to renew a Jews for Jesus banner ad after complaints from the Jewish community. Joan Rivers publicly denounced the Messianic Jewish organization after a Jews for Jesus ad was aired during a live broadcast of her radio show in July. “I am a Jew, I was born a Jew, and I plan to die a Jew,” Rivers said. “How dare you advertise on my show!”

MILLENNIAL STRATEGY: Despite pockets of public opposition to Jewish evangelism efforts, the SBC’s actions garnered strong support among many evangelicals during “To the Jew First in the New Millennium: A Conference on Jewish Evangelism,” September 23-25 at Calvary Baptist Church in New York.

“There needs to be a renewed commitment by the general church to Jewish missions,” says Mitch Glaser, president of the Charlotte, North Carolina–based Chosen People Ministries, which sponsored the conference.

During a press conference with Paige Patterson, SBC president and co-convener of the conference, Glaser thanked Southern Baptists for the prayer guide.

“I love being prayed for by Southern Baptists,” says Glaser, who is a Messianic Jew. “If my people knew what I know about Jesus—or Yeshua—then they wouldn’t be threatened by what I thought was a sensitive, educational prayer guide.”

Jay Sekulow, a Messianic Jew and chief legal counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, acknowledges, “The SBC has been very courageous on this issue and has taken a lot of heat.”

Despite the public attention, Jim R. Sibley, coordinator of Jewish ministries for the SBC’s North American Mission Board, denies Baptists have allocated an inordinate amount of resources to reach Jews with the gospel. Instead, he insists, Jewish evangelism is just one part of the SBC’s overall missions objectives.

SENSITIVITY NEEDED: Even as most Messianic Jews close ranks with Southern Baptists, most American Jews oppose the SBC strategy—with some exceptions.

Jeff Jacoby, a Boston Globe columnist, says he is grateful for Southern Baptist prayers. “As a Jew, I cannot share the Baptists’ belief in Jesus,” Jacoby writes. “But I can certainly acknowledge that by their lights they are offering the Jewish people something incalculably precious: eternal salvation.”

Conference speakers acknowledged that Christians have often lacked tact in presenting the gospel to Jews and urged sensitivity to cultural differences.

“There are those in the field of Jewish evangelism who gauge their success by the extent to which the Jewish community gets upset,” observes Stuart Dauermann, rabbi of Ahavat Tzion, a Messianic Jewish congregation in Beverly Hills, California.

Calling such efforts perverse, Dauermann cautions that “what Jewish people want to avoid most is not Jesus but pathology, disruption of family structures, incursions into their communities by uninvited zealots, and erosion of the Jewish community.”

David Epstein, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in New York, notes the deep hurt some Jews feel toward Christians. “Often it’s the heart that has been damaged so deeply,” says Epstein, an ordained Southern Baptist minister whose grandfather was Jewish. “We need to realize that our Jewish friends and relatives are hurting. They identify much of Christendom with hatred of them.”

TWO COVENANTS? Southern Baptist evangelism efforts are fueled by a rejection of two-covenant theology—a doctrine developed by Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), who claimed the Jews have their own covenant with God and therefore do not need Christ.

“It is true that a doctrine of two covenants to many has the ring of good news,” says Kai Kjaer-Hansen, international coordinator in Denmark for the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism. “But if the gospel is not or no longer for Jews, then it is no longer good news for Gentiles.”

This rejection of two-covenant theology holds significant end-times importance. The SBC’s Patterson told conference attendees that he believes 144,000 Jews—12,000 from each tribe—will spread the gospel during the period of tribulation after the Christian church is raptured. “The gospel will not be raptured; only people are raptured,” Patterson says.

Conference speakers largely rejected replacement theology, which defines the church as the new Israel. “It has become commonplace among more recent theologians to regard the Christian church as the new successor and replacement for the Israel of Romans 9–11,” says Walter C. Kaiser Jr., president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. “[But] Paul proposes no new definition for Israel. For him there was only one Israel.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

While the government of Sudan is rejoicing these days over the crude oil it began exporting in late August, oil revenues may be fueling Sudan’s protracted and bloody civil war.

The Religious Liberty Commission of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (RLC) is the latest to add its voice to the mounting protest against Talisman Energy, which owns a 25 percent share of the multinational conglomerate that is pumping oil from southern Sudan. The RLC has written both to the president of the Calgary, Alberta-based company and to Canada’s minister of foreign affairs, Lloyd Axworthy.

In addition, the Canadian Inter-Church Coalition on Africa (ICCAF) has been negotiating with Talisman president James Buckee and with the Canadian government for about a year. ICCAF coordinator Gary Kenny says the government could use legislation to stop Talisman from operating in Sudan. But David Kilgour, Canada’s secretary of state for Africa and a Presbyterian, says there are no measures that can be used without cutting off Canada’s humanitarian aid to the African nation.

Talisman president Buckee is quick to return calls from human-rights organizations and church groups, but slow to admit there is a problem with drilling in Sudan. He does not believe there is a slave trade in Sudan, or that there is persecution of Christians. “It looked fine to me,” he says of a visit to the drilling area. But just in case of attack from rebels, he notes, the Sudanese army is standing guard at the pipeline.

For some Christians, the issue is complicated because their denominations own shares of Talisman stock. So far, the dozen Canadian churches and organizations holding shares have tried repeatedly to get the company to follow strict standards in its dealings with Sudan. The company has refused.

Kenny believes the church groups—which include the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, and the Presbyterian Church (USA)—should pull out. “The only morally defensible thing to do is to divest,” he says.

Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group, agrees. On October 4, Jacobs and Freedom House asked the New York City Council to get rid of its shares—which the council holds through investment and retirement funds. “Should the retirement money of New York City’s workers help fund another terror bombing here? Or more slave raids?” he asked.

New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi is considering a plan to divest the city pension fund’s $4 million stake in Talisman. Hevesi told the council that the city “should declare a sense of outrage at the loss of life, the massacres and the rapes that are everyday policy for the Sudanese government.”

Hevesi also wrote to Talisman president Buckee with his concerns about human-rights abuses. “As long-term investors, we believe a company that is cavalier about its moral and social responsibility presents an unacceptable investment risk,” he wrote. “The expanding divestment campaign against Talisman Energy for alleged complicity in the horrors in Sudan is just one indication of that risk.”

The divestment campaign is spreading. The U.S. Committee for Refugees has called for a worldwide campaign to divest stock in Talisman until the company agrees to cease its partnership with the Sudanese government. Executive director Roger P. Winter says Talisman “has put profit before human life in its partnership with the Government of Sudan and the state-owned oil companies of China and Malaysia.”

According to the American Anti-Slavery Group, the group with the largest stake in Talisman is Capital Research and Management Company with more than three million shares.

Other groups holding shares include State Street Research and Management Company, State of New Jersey Division of Investment, Vanguard Specialized Energy Portfolio, State of Wisconsin Investment Board, Fidelity Canadian Asset Allocation Fund, Fidelity True North Fund, College Retirement Stock Account, and State Street Research Global Resource Fund.

The issue of slavery, and especially slave redemption, has become controversial. An estimated 2 million people have died in Sudan since 1983, and thousands have been abducted and sold as chattel slaves. Numerous documented reports exist of tortures, rapes, village bombings, and even crucifixions.

While some Christian groups support and participate in the redemption of slaves, others feel the money paid to slave traders only helps acquire more slaves and buy more weapons (CT, Aug. 9, 1999, p. 28).

Just days after the September 27 season premiere of Touched by an Angel, which portrayed the slavery in Sudan, the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International purchased the freedom of 4,300 African slaves, bringing to 15,447 the total number of slaves it has redeemed since 1995. The slaves, mainly women and children, returned to their families in the south.

Meanwhile, the Anglican Church of Canada has released a statement that redemption programs are not the solution, because “participating in the buying of human beings contradicts our faith in the incarnation and belief that all persons are created in the image of God.”

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

When the 35 residents of Antelope, Oregon, heard two years ago that some kind of religious group planned to take over a ranch 12 miles from town, alarm bells sounded. Some drew comfort from learning that their new neighbors would be the evangelical group Young Life, which simply wanted to turn 700,000 square feet of abandoned buildings and 64,000 acres of land into camp facilities for teens. But few would blame those who lived through the town’s occupation by followers of Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh for casting a wary eye at outsiders.

BHAGWAN’S OLD DIGS: Young Life’s new Washington Family Ranch, which opened one of two camps planned for the site this past summer, bears stark contrast to its previous tenants, who took over the Eastern Oregon high desert town from 1981 to 1985. The 3,000 Rajneeshees who poured in during that time squelched local resistance by buying up enough of the town to control the city council. Renamed “Rajneeshpuram,” the town drew international media attention that focused on the Bhagwan’s more than 90 Rolls-Royce cars and unconventional religious teachings that “free sex is fun, materialism is good, and Jesus was a madman.” The Justice Department kicked out the Bhagwan and his followers in the fall of 1985 and Rajneeshpuram became Antelope again. The Bhagwan died in India in 1990.

Nearly 15 years later, however, the wounds are still tender. “I have yet to hear anybody speak one kind word about them,” says Jim Walker, a former rancher and sheriff’s deputy who has lived in the area since 1970. “As far as people in Antelope and the ranchers around there, if you’re an East Indian, if you have a turban on your head, or anything weird, or speak different, they want to know what you’re doing.”

Most wanted the ranch, still known by the old-timers as “the Big Muddy,” to return to tumbleweeds. That could have become the ranch’s fate when Montana businessman Dennis Washington purchased it in 1991. But through a series of events that Young Life leaders believe could only be God-inspired, Washington donated the land, which is now valued at $20 million.

One of Young Life’s other prize properties is the Malibu Club, which was built as a resort for Hollywood’s elite in the 1940s at the mouth of the Princess Louisa Inlet in British Columbia. Owner Tom Hamilton, who made a fortune selling airplane propellers to the Nazis in the mid-1930s, sold Malibu to Young Life below market value after a visit to a youth camp won him over to the work of youth outreach.

Many non-Christians are impressed by Young Life’s ministry, says spokesman Greg Hunter. “It happens even today when people see Young Life reaching into the foreign culture of young people, loving them and making an impact in their lives,” Hunter says. “They say, I can’t believe anybody is doing that these days.”

Colorado Springs-based Young Life, with more than 50 years of camping experience, draws over 30,000 teenagers each summer to its 19 national camps. More than 80,000 attend weekend or holiday retreats during the rest of the year. The new Wildhorse Canyon Camp near Antelope averaged 165 campers a week for 10 weeks last summer.

COMMUNITY HEALING: Researching Young Life’s past helped convince Walker that the camp would be good for the Antelope community. “I was concerned about what was coming back in, because of the trouble we had had with the Rajneesh,” Walker says.

Young Life engaged in a delicate legal and civic process before taking title to the land at the end of 1997, says property manager Jay McAlonen. “Quite honestly, to this day I’m surprised we got the property.”

Winning the hearts of the locals was the first priority. “Our strategy was that if we were to have the property it would be with the approval of the residents,” McAlonen says. “We had a sincere desire to not just put in a Young Life camp, but to do what we could to heal this community and help it in any way we can.”

Part of that healing, Young Life believed, was cleansing the land and its buildings, through prayer, of any lingering spiritual residue. “We believe that there was a real presence of the enemy on the property,” says McAlonen. That was especially true in the Bhagwan’s former residence. “I’m not a person that normally has this type of discernment, but you would go into this house and it just plain gave you the creeps.”

After a few initial visits in 1996, one Young Life leader remarked that if the ministry ever got the land it should tear down the Bhagwan residence. Three weeks later, says McAlonen, a fire went over the whole property and it was the only house that was destroyed.

MIRACLE PROJECT: The task of developing the property has been helped with one miracle after another, McAlonen says. His partner, project manager Rex Baird, says that working on the camp has been like Murphy’s Law in reverse: “Anything that can go right will.”

When a leak developed in the ranch’s enormous water system, workers found themselves unable to sort out its complexities. A day later they managed to locate the San Francisco office of Jack Lampl—the engineer who built it and a former Rajneeshee himself. Lampl happened to be in Portland for a conference and had set aside a couple of extra days afterward to relax. He agreed to drop by, quoting his rates. After Lampl’s two long days of work, Young Life asked how much it owed. “I feel good about what you’re doing,” Lampl said. “I don’t want to charge you.”

Young Life had originally planned on a costly system that would pump a required 50 gallons a minute into a two-and-a-half-acre swimming pond. Not long after the hole was dug, workers on a neighboring project uncovered a spring that pumps 50 gallons a minute.

The day after a company donated 30,000 gallons of paint, a contractor called Young Life to offer the services of his eight-member crew. “I can provide everything but the paint,” he said.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Seventy years after Darwin’s theory triumphed in the landmark Scopes trial, a brash new generation of faith-friendly scientists is having unexpected success in reshaping the contentious debate over the origin of life and the universe.

In a stunning development three months ago, social conservatives successfully persuaded the Kansas State Board of Education to issue new standards that would remove Darwinian evolutionary theory from state tests. Local school districts may still decide what to teach. To avoid similar controversy, the Kentucky Education Department quietly dropped the word evolution from its teaching guidelines in October.

But the backlash may already be under way. New Mexico education officials recently banned the teaching of creationism in public schools.

Amid public policy rumblings on creation versus evolution, a fresh crop of scientists—many associated with the Seattle-based Discovery Institute—are developing their theory that the universe shows clear evidence of “intelligent design.”

Researchers gathered in New York in September to discuss their work and propose a new way to study the origins of life and the universe. Phillip Johnson, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley and a strategist for the intelligent-design movement, calls the institute’s scientists “the wedge” who are driving into the cracks of modernist science. As they push forward, Johnson predicts, Darwinian theory will be split apart like a dry log. He reasons that because evolution cannot be fully proven from science itself, some scientists by default invoke dogmatically held beliefs, not scientific results.

TOO MUCH DESIGN? Origins scientists are going beyond their critique of Darwinian theory to expand their own field research. Both the Discovery Institute (DI)—a conservative public-policy center specializing in the science and technology of the information age—and the Institute for Christian Research have launched multiple-scientist, long-term research programs.

But only DI scientists have proposed a more far-reaching program of detecting design in the universe. Origins science is not the only research area to search for a “blueprint.” Many fields depend on the ability to detect design, including intellectual property law, forensic science, insurance investigations, cryptography, archaeology, computer science, and the search for life in outer space.

The universe is so “irreducibly complex,” says DI fellow William Dembski, it is hard to discover any explanation except intelligent design. Darwinian theory concerning the evolution of life specifies that complex structures be built by one small functional improvement after another. But if a system is irreducibly complex, the interacting parts must all be together before any functional improvement can be made. Small changes before the complex structure exists cannot improve any function, so they have no survival value.

Yet some attenders of the New York meeting expressed that a weakness of current intelligent-design ideas could be that they require too much design. DI supports a project against the idea of “junk DNA.” Many parts in DNA strands appear to have no purpose. Many scientists believe the strands are leftovers or random fillers between the parts that carry real messages. In contrast, DI scientists believe that if intelligent design is true, then all parts of the DNA chain must have a function.

Some scientists in earlier generations, heirs to Isaac Newton’s clocklike image of the cosmos, also imagined that everything must have a benign purpose. Consequently, Darwin’s rediscovery of violence and struggle in nature caught them by surprise. Morally and logically offended, they asked how a God of beauty and order could work through violence and disorder. Generally, they did not reconsider how their mechanistic world-view left out the devastating effects of the Fall as detailed in the Genesis narrative. Some wonder if intelligent design theorists are making the same mistake.

AVOIDING DEADLOCKS: Advocates of intelligent design try to avoid other deadlocks between evolutionists, theistic evolutionists, and young-earth creationists by not focusing on God as Creator. They ask whether the cosmos was intelligently designed, not who did the designing or how. “Design theory is a bigger tent and doesn’t treat Genesis as a scientific text,” says DI fellow Michael Behe, famous for his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box (CT, April 28, 1997, p. 14). “Many others—Stoics and Muslims, for example—also could agree that the universe is intelligently designed.”

Most of the current intelligent-design advocates, however, are Christians—including Behe, a Catholic. Founded by an Episcopalian, DI’s origins group includes many evangelical Protestants, closely followed in numbers by Catholics.

Intelligent-design scientists also dodge what Behe calls “political morality plays,” such as evolution in school curricula. In a New York Times essay, Behe urges Kansas schools to “teach Darwin’s elegant theory. But also discuss where it has real problems and where alternative—even ‘heretical’—explanations are possible.”

Biologist Chris Mammoliti, who works for the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, has likewise asked some local Kansas school districts to include the theory of intelligent design in their curriculum. But Dick Kurt en back, Kansas director of American Civil Liberties Union, says his organization will move to stop any inclusion of intelligent design in the science curriculum.

The Kansas debate exemplifies the cross-religious alliance on origins science. According to the Topeka Capitol-Journal, Omar Hazim, Imam at the Islamic Center in Topeka, agrees with the state board of education that evolution should not be taught in the public schools. “We believe in creationism. God created all things in the universe,” he says. Likewise, Thurman Young, a United Pentecostal minister in Junction City, Kansas, says, “If they’re going to teach [evolution], then they should teach the other also and let a child make up its own mind.”

According to a Gallup poll, about 50 percent of Americans believe in creationism, 40 percent in theistic evolution, and 10 percent in materialistic or Darwinian evolution. Sixty-eight percent think both creation and evolution should be taught in the schools.

PUSHING ALTERNATIVES: Accordingly, politicians are pushing for alternatives to creationism and evolution—including intelligent design—in the classroom. GOP presidential hopeful Gary Bauer decries evolutionists who say, “There is no divine intelligence involved.” Texas Gov. George W. Bush, also a presidential candidate, says his policy is that “children ought to be exposed to different theories about how the world started.”

The creationists on the Kansas board of education won by persuading a noncreationist that the evolutionists had dogmatically excluded origins-science alternatives.

Students also are looking to broaden the debate. “It’s frustrating because they teach evolution as fact, but we know it’s not true,” says Jerry Won, a student at Bronx High School of Science in New York. More finalists in the prestigious Westinghouse/Intel Science competition have come from Bronx High than any other American school, but Won says the school seems afraid to let students test theories about origins. “They never teach the flaws [in Darwinian theory],” he says. Vicky Cho of the evangelical Urban Youth Alliance Seekers at Stuyvesant High School admits she has to live a double life. “On tests, I always give the answer they want, even if I don’t believe it,” she says. “I just pray to God that everyone will see the truth someday.”

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Ten years ago, on November 9, 1989, the Wall came down. Swinging sledgehammers and anything else avail able, the hands of the people reintegrated East Berlin with the free world. Experts stood with mouths agape, and the peoples of the entire Soviet bloc cheered as the hated symbol of oppression crumbled.

Just one month before, the prayers of thousands of believers gathered at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche had turned a potential massacre into a peaceful confrontation that came to be called the Candlelight Revolution (see CT, January 15, 1990). This was die Wende, the turning point. And the church was there at the center of change.

How has the church fared since then? In recent interviews with several Christian leaders in the post-Communist world, CT explored what we had learned from the past ten years that will help us serve better when the still-Communist world begins to dissolve.

Exploded economic dreamsOne of the biggest disappointments in the Eastern bloc was the failure of new economic dreams. The tales of corruption, organized crime, and failed attempts at privatization of industries are well known. But, says Croatian theologian Peter Kuzmic, the economic disappointment was due to more than greed and power-grabbing.

First, Kuzmic says, the dreams were unrealistic: “There is a saying in Kosovo: ‘You cannot jump out of the sandals and into a Mercedes.’ ” Second, “Communism stifled, in some places eliminated, creativity and initiative. You need a change of mindset for a free-market economy.” Third, “you need the kind of legal framework that will prevent corruption and dubious privatization.” Because those elements were missing when the state-controlled economies were dismantled, what followed was not a free market but a vacuum.

Fortunately, Western Christians were among those who helped write new constitutions that guaranteed economic and personal liberties. Others helped to prepare educational materials that would teach young people the Christian ethics essential to both a free market and a free society. But inculcating a broad societal respect for law, for rights, and for other people takes decades, and the economic and political transitions were measured in weeks and days.

It is not only post-Communist culture that needs ethical transformation, says Romanian Baptist theologian Danut Manastireanu. It is the church and its membership. “In my country,” he says, “evangelical Christians are not very distinguishable from the rest of the population in promoting high ethical values.”

Mark Elliott, director of Beeson Divinity School’s Global Center, makes the same observation about Russian Christians. “Many of them cut corners without giving it a second thought.” Indeed, says Elliott, even in the 100-plus new Protestant seminaries in Russia, “cheating is a serious problem because of the system they come out of.”

Life under Communism was simple. “Now we certainly are not prepared for these choices,” says Manastireanu. “The risk is the desire for a Big Brother who would decide for us and provide. And the same thing is true with respect to the church.” Under Communism, Romania’s Baptist Union was led by an autocrat. Now “we have many little dictators in the church,” he says. “Our only hope is for our generation to go away. And the best we can do is to be stepping stones for those who are coming behind us.”

This bleak account needs to be balanced by accounts of believers who suffered for truth and whose prayers helped bring down oppressive regimes. Yet, writes Polish editor Adam Szostkiewicz in a recent issue of Commonweal, “The model of courageous and faithful individuals who witnessed to their faith under Communist persecution does not easily translate into a larger pattern of religion acting as a friend of freedom and liberty for everyone.”

Eastern evangelicals have barely come out of their cultural isolation and largely avoid political participation. They have become fractured and competitive—partially because of Western dollars and maverick missions. While some ministries cooperated with each other and with existing church structures (the CoMission being the brightest example), too many seized the chance to call attention to themselves and exploit the fundraising appeal of taking the gospel to the former Eastern bloc. Mean while, ethnic wars and atrocities have compromised the historic churches, which in the wake of the political revolutions have often sided with nationalist, antimodern forces.

Beyond disappointmentsFailure creates opportunities for learning—opportunities that must be seized. First, Christians must help people find identity. Says Beeson’s Elliott: “Evangelicals have a special role to play in Eastern Europe, for they are the only Christians in the region that aren’t identified automatically with a particular ethnic group.” For example, Elliott says Peter Kuzmic’s seminary in the former Yugoslavia is “one of the few places where people from most if not all of the ethnic groups sit down at the same table.”

Western Christians have a role to play as well, as believers are desperately needed to work in conflict-resolution seminars, theological training, and even communications.

But in any effort, cooperation in mission is key. “Too often,” wrote Elliott in a 1996 article, “a wild-West, free-spirit, mighty-maverick approach to preaching ends in what might be called hit-and-run evangelism. The number of Eastern European ministries rose from 311 in 1989 to 750 in 1996. It was not just the new political scene, but a lack of coordination among Western agencies that produced the statistical boom. Partnership between Western ministries and their Eastern indigenous counterparts, as well as cooperation among the grassroots ministries within the former Eastern bloc, can pay big dividends in witness and efficiency. “One of the greatest things that came out of the Wall coming down when it comes to Christian community is that Eastern European Christians found an exit from their isolation,” Kuzmic told CT. “They had become members of the international family of God.”

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“Christian kitsch” or “Jesus junk” has been criticized by high-minded fellow Christians and ridiculed by the non-Christian culture. Despite the criticism, it generates more than $3 billion in revenues annually. Impediments beyond sporadic criticism have remained surprisingly few—even when we’ve deserved them.

We tend to create our own cultural artifacts by tweaking famous icons from pop culture. In the 1970s we created signs saying “Jesus Christ: He’s the real thing” in Coca-Cola lettering. In the late 1980s, we moved on to harder stuff: “Budweiser, King of Beers,” became “Be Wiser, King of Kings.” Today, usurping from dairy farmers (“Got Jesus?”) and Taco Bell (“Yo Quiero Jesus”) are the hotter trends. That we have not been sued is amazing.

Actually, one Christian company has. Ty, Inc., makers of the hugely popular Beanie Babies, filed a lawsuit in September against HolyBears, Inc., makers of similarly designed (but Christianized) beanbag animals.

The case is far from black and white, and it is for the courts, not Chrisitanity Today, to decide if HolyBears actually infringe on the copyright of the Beanie Babies. HolyBears do look a lot like their more famous cousins—substituting a Bible on the paw and a wwjd on the chest for a heart on the ear. Then again, Beanie Baby bears and HolyBears look pretty much like teddy bears have since their inception at the turn of the century.

Legal specifics aside, the HolyBears case illustrates our need to have theological and ethical guidelines when it comes to appropriating popular culture for our own ends. Inter acting with popular culture in a Christian manner means more than simply embroidering wwjd on a stuffed bear or deciding to record a Christian swing album because swing music is popular.

Bill Romanowski, professor of communications arts and sciences at Calvin College and author of Pop Culture Wars (InterVarsity, 1996), sees four ways Christians have dealt with popular culture: condemnation, consumption, appropriation, and transformation—with the last being our true calling. “Appropriating culture,” taking possession of a cultural trend for “Christian” use, he says, “is imitation rather than actually trying to engage or critique culture. It demeans cultural activity by limiting its purpose to mere ecclesiastical functions.”

Like our cover story author, Randall Balmer (see p. 32), Romanowski is skeptical about the Contemporary Christian Music industry in general. “There tends to be this attitude of ‘Buy my record and worship God,’ where consumption is equated with worship,” he says. But neither does he dismiss bands like Jars of Clay—or other “Christian culture” artifacts—out of hand: “I don’t want to demean what some people are trying to do, but you have to go into it knowing it’s loaded with weaknesses.”

One reason Jars of Clay has been so successful, not only in Christian circles but in the culture at large, is because the band pursued originality. The members may claim to be influenced by the Beatles and Radiohead, but they never attempted to be, like some other Christian bands, “a Christian Radiohead.” The VeggieTales video series has likewise gained a massive audience because it is creative and surprisingly unlike anything currently offered in secular or Christian stores.

It is neither legally nor ethically justifiable to steal intellectual property from the mainstream culture under the guise of ministry, outreach, or relevancy. So here’s to more creativity in the mindset of transforming culture. And let’s pursue transformation rather than imitation.

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The next Jars of Clay may be in class right now, taking notes on the art of Amy Grant or doing lab work on the science of dc Talk. Since 1987, starry-eyed students hoping to parlay their bachelor’s degrees into recording contracts have signed up for a trailblazing program in Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) at Greenville College, a Christian liberal-arts school in south-central Illinois.

Paved with Mayberryesque streets and surrounded by enough corn fields to host a Hee Haw convention, Greenville is not the first place you’d think of going to find Contemporary Christian Music. But with the explosive growth of CCM (the genre posted $863 million in 1998, according to CCM Update), and with secular music companies gobbling up independent Christian labels, Greenville College’s CCM major seems ahead of its time.

The program was the brainchild of Greenville music department head Ralph Montgomery, who wanted to equip students for working in the music industry. “We met a lot of Christian musicians who didn’t know what they were doing,” says Montgomery. A major in CCM could train students both musically and spiritually, he reasoned.

But how do you teach a genre of music that many people perceive as being more flash than art, more commercialism than ministry? “We do not graduate students to necessarily work in the Contemporary Christian Music industry,” says Warren Pettit, who now leads the CCM program. “We are just as interested in students graduating to work in the general marketplace and bringing their Christian world-view to it.”

The course load for CCM majors looks a lot like the curriculum for traditional music majors, but with ample class time on studio technology, live performance, and business. In a class called “The Philosophy and Ethics of CCM,” for instance, students wrestle with the challenges of maintaining one’s integrity in a cutthroat business environment.

Each year, 70 to 80 freshmen enter as CCM majors, but only about 15 will graduate with a CCM degree. According to sophom*ore Kenny Carlson, the program is no cakewalk. “It’s not for everybody who has stars in their eyes and wants to be a rock ‘n’ roll star,” he says, “but it has taught me that anybody can have the potential if they’re willing to concentrate on the work that’s involved.”

So far, the members of Jars of Clay are the most recognizable names on the CCM program’s roll of alumni, but nationally known artists like Sarah Jahn, Amy Susan Foster, and Stereo Deluxx are also alums.

According to Pettit, it’s often difficult for Christian schools to embrace the rock, alternative, and atypical styles that characterize music today: “It’s a shame that we’re one of few schools that have fully embraced a contemporary music curriculum.

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In recording If I Left the Zoo, Jars of Clay‘s just released album, the band escaped Nashville and spent months in virtual seclusion in Oxford, Mississippi, working with producer Dennis Herring, whose previous credits include Counting Crows. If I Left the Zoo is even more daring than the first two albums, more inventive and more self-confident. Jars of Clay continues to draw on a variety of musical sources—the eclecticism that, paradoxically, has defined the band’s uniqueness. Even the most uneducated ear will pick up the country-music sounds of “No One Loves Me Like You” and the rhythm and blues (with a nod toward Motown) in “I’m Alright.”

The first several cuts are reminiscent of Sgt. Pepper, with the ebullient Jar boys raiding the sound-effects closet much the way that the Beatles did. Add to that the playful guitar riffs, the falsetto phrases, and the unconventional juxtaposition of accordion and string bass, recalling the use of Gregorian chant from the first album, and you have something that is quintessentially Jars of Clay.

Eclectic, perhaps, but not formulaic. If I Left the Zoo highlights the keyboard work of Charlie Lowell much more than the guitar-driven music of the first two albums. Warren Pettit of Greenville College detects a new maturity in the voices, especially Haseltine’s: “The delivery of his singing seems a bit more personal and intimate. Some of the polish has worn off.”

Jars of Clay have never shied away from issues like loneliness or depression—witness “Tea and Sympathy” from Much Afraid, a cautionary tale of an extramarital affair. If I Left the Zoo includes several songs on the human condition, with pithy phrases like “my affluent disguise” or “drink a toast to fear,” and a meditation on Frederick Buechner’s comment that faith is reaching for a hand in the darkness. But the album also includes “Goodbye, Goodnight,” which Haseltine describes as “a comical look at the end of the millennium through the eyes of the string players aboard the Titanic.”

Once again, as with Much Afraid, the final cut is quiet and reflective. “River Constantine” invokes the Holy Spirit (although, regrettably, the mix allows the music to overwhelm the lyrics) and does not have the elegiac power of “Hymn,” the benediction on Much Afraid, but I suspect I’ll grow more attached to it as I listen again and again.

Balmer is the author of Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (Oxford, 1993), Grant Us Courage: Travels Along the Mainline of American Protestantism (Oxford, 1996), and the upcoming Blessed Assurance: A History of Evangelicalism in America (Beacon, 1999).

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Peter Drucker told Forbes magazine that “pastoral megachurches” are “surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years.” Bob Buford, a cable-TV businessman who pioneered Leadership Network for large-church leaders, says this is “way ahead, out on the thin branches. Tell me how many people, even in the churches, believe it.” In 1991 Drucker told an audience of church leaders that American churches are in the midst of a remarkable renaissance. “This, to my mind, for my lifetime, is the greatest, the most important, the most momentous event, and the turning point not just in churches but perhaps in the human spirit altogether.”

Peter Ferdinand Drucker is an old man now, 90 this year, yet his reputation in the world of business has not dimmed. He wrote “Beyond the

Information Revoluation,” the October cover story for the Atlantic Monthly. Last year Forbes had him on its cover, Fortune ran a long article, and Wired, the hip techno magazine, featured an interview asking not about the past, but the future. What other 90-year-old gets asked his thoughts on the future? The Atlantic Monthly‘s Jack Beatty published a biography. Forbes proclaimed Drucker “Still the youngest mind.” And this mind is increasingly preoccupied with the work of the church.

The kingdom of the nonprofitsDrucker is known as a management guru. (He is said to detest the description.) Many would call him the world’s pre-eminent management thinker. Oddly, this management expert has little management experience. Adventures of a Bystander is the title Drucker gave his memoirs, and it’s a revealing choice. Drucker works alone. He has no assistant, and he answers his own phone. (It’s a startling thing to punch up the number of a person this famous and to hear a gravelly voice, with conspicuous Austrian accent, croak “Peter Drucker.”) Now a days he hardly travels; people have to come to him, a constant stream of visitors to his home in Claremont, California, paying fancy prices to talk to him about their concerns. He has done this for 50 years, notoriously with businesses, but equally and increasingly with nonprofits and churches, often on a pro bono basis.

Drucker presents himself as a worldly wise man, who has devoted his life to studying very this-worldly realities. It comes as some surprise, therefore, that he gives so much of his time and interest to nonprofit organizations, and particularly to churches. For most business consultants, for most Americans, these are worthy but weak institutions. Do other management gurus offer the Girl Scouts as a model?

Drucker preaches incessantly that leaders must find out what their own unique contribution can be. He applies the sermon to himself, taking two weeks every year to evaluate what he has done and to plan for the coming year. Drucker does not work with nonprofits simply as a goodwill gesture. He involves himself with nonprofits because he sees them as strategic—indeed, as the fastest-growing and most important sector of American life.

Drucker is a Christian, a practicing Episcopalian, but from his writings it would be hard to say much more than that about his faith. He tells us that after growing up in a nominally Christian home, he was absolutely poleaxed by the accidental discovery of Soren Kierkegaard’s writings. This was so important an event that he taught himself Danish in order to read Kierkegaard’s then-untranslated works. Unfortunately, Drucker spends little time explaining how this momentous event of his youth affected him. Drucker has written 30 books, including his memoirs, but exactly one essay, written in 1949, discusses the meaning of Kierkegaard. (Kierkegaard shows that “society is not enough—not even for society,” and that “though Kierkegaard’s faith cannot overcome the awful loneliness, the isolation and dissonance of human existence, it can make it bearable by making it meaningful. … Kierkegaard’s faith … enables man to die; but it also enables him to live.”

Drucker’s writings seem determined to keep his faith a secondary characteristic for his readers. Adventures of a Bystander seems quite worldly in the way it presents, utterly without judgment, baroque and incredible sexual behavior from some of Drucker’s friends and acquaintances. Drucker hardly ever uses theological or biblical terminology to express himself, even if he is writing about something that easily fits theological categories. With some other management writer this might be an accident, but Drucker is so well educated in philosophy and theology that it has to be a conscious choice.

The rise of Nazism is the starting place for everything Drucker writes.

The point is that Drucker is not a man of pious gestures. He is not drawn to donate his extra time to charity to show that he is a good Christian. He sticks to what he does best: offering his expertise where he thinks he can make the maximum difference.

Drucker has made a career out of seeing the world from an unfamiliar angle—of noticing the significance of some factor that others miss. Fortune introduced him as “the most prescient business-trend spotter of our time.” They credited Drucker with being among the first (in the early 1950s) to see how computers would transform business, first (in 1961) to perceive Japan’s impending economic miracle, first to describe such ideas as “privatization,” “knowledge workers,” and “management by objectives.” Drucker is sometimes wrong, but he has been spectacularly right so often (not to mention interesting and stimulating) that business leaders flock to read and hear him.

Never, perhaps, has Drucker been so out of phase with conventional wisdom as in his fascination with nonprofits and churches. To understand why Drucker considers the nonprofit sector of society so pivotal, to see why he devotes so much time to the success of charities and churches, you must step back to see his whole career.

A moral passionDrucker grew up in Vienna between the world wars. As a 17-year-old just out of school, he moved to Germany, where he worked as a journalist, studied (a doctorate in law), and watched Hitler rise. Drucker’s first book, a brief, admiring account of a nineteenth-century Jew, Friedrich Julius Stahl, was banned and burned by the Nazis a few months after they came to power. Drucker had hoped for that, he says, deliberately choosing to write “a book that would make it impossible for the Nazis to have anything to do with me.” With no future in Germany, Drucker at 24 fled to England. One of his last conversations the night before his departure was with a newspaper colleague who would go on to be nicknamed “The Monster” for his role in the Nazi SS.

The rise of Nazism is the starting place for everything Drucker writes. He is haunted, not so much by Hitler as by the vacuum that Hitler filled. The Europe of Drucker’s youth lost its way, Drucker says—economically, spiritually, governmentally. Europe lacked “management,” which Drucker defines as the ability to make human strength productive under new and challenging conditions. Instead, Europe as he remembers it was fixated on nostalgic memories. The church was irrelevant. People were constantly speaking of “prewar” (World War I) as though it were the lost continent of Atlantis. And so they got Nazism, which posed as “The Wave of the Future” against this “Wave of the Past.”

Drucker’s work is dedicated to “never again.” “To make our institutions perform responsibly, autonomously, and on a high level of achievement is … the only safeguard of freedom and dignity.”

After a few years in England, where he met and married his wife, Doris—they have been married more than 60 years—Drucker moved to the United States. This new home is also an important context for his work, for while Drucker has kept his accent, he is very American in his sensibilities—that is to say, practical and optimistic. In Depression America he found a hopeful and cooperative spirit, very unlike the bitterness and despair he had felt throughout Europe. When war came, America’s economy quickly mobilized to produce huge amounts of war materiel. Hitler was defeated not so much by bravery (as exemplified in Saving Private Ryan) as by industry.

Drucker, while haunted by Europe’s failure, is fundamentally an optimist. He believes in human strengths to counter human weaknesses. The science of discovering those strengths, of fitting them into a productive framework, is what Drucker calls management. As much as any single individual, he is responsible for the modern interest in it.

A society of organizationsIn the 1940s, Drucker saw something so fundamental it has held his attention more or less constantly in the 50 years since. Drucker saw that we have become a society of organizations. Drucker knew that organizations were not new—he often said that the greatest manager in history was the man who built the pyramids. But organizations had become central and omnipresent, trumping tradition and doctrine, eclipsing families and dynasties, forcing “great leaders” to show that they could exert their powers through vast bureaucracies. (Think of Eisenhower’s military victories.)

The trend was most obvious in business. Most business leaders a generation before had owned the firm. They made all the important decisions themselves. Now, a new kind of creature had taken over: the manager. He was not an owner, an inventor, or a financier. He worked for a salary. His expertise lay in getting a team of people to work effectively for a goal.

Henry Ford’s assembly line was more than a manufacturing technique, Drucker realized; it was a way of conceiving of work. The idea that any job can be broken down into its constituent parts, that different people can be trained to specialize in those parts, that they can work together in a disciplined and harmonious framework—this was not merely the way to build cars, it was the way to accomplish almost anything through organization. The crucial element was leadership, enabling various specialists to work together. That leadership, analogous to conducting a symphony, is management.

Drucker began to study business management when hardly anyone had noticed that such a thing existed. There were no business schools or management texts as we know them today. To study business was considered a sure dead end for an academic career. (Drucker was teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, where president Lewis Jones warned him, “You are going to destroy your career in academia forever.”)

Nor did business want to be studied. Drucker says his first attempts to find a company to study met with suspicion and rejection. Only by a fluke did he latch onto General Motors, which gave him complete access. The result was a highly influential book, Concept of the Corporation. Businesses began to come to him for insight and help.

Management is about peopleDrucker developed an understanding of management that was deeply humane—not mechanical, not technical, but pastoral. As Drucker wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1994, “All managers do the same things, whatever the purpose of their organization. All of them have to bring people—each possessing different knowledge—together for joint performance. All of them have to make human strengths productive in performance and human weaknesses irrelevant. All of them have to think through what results are wanted in the organization—and have then to define objectives.”

Management by objectives is a management style identified with Drucker. Sometimes, unfortunately, the phrase has come to mean something quite different than Drucker intended. For some, management by objectives means setting targets and insisting that your staff meet them. It can stand for a relentless bottom-line mentality.

That is almost the opposite of Drucker’s idea. Drucker calls for the worker, together with his boss, to develop meaningful objectives based on a thorough understanding of the work. Meaningful objectives begin with the mission of the organization and require much thought and understanding of the unique contribution a worker can make to that mission.

Management by objectives means giving workers autonomy—helping them to set goals and freeing them to find their own way to reach those goals. This is quite different from supervision, in which a manager sets goals, tells the worker how to achieve them, and then keeps a close eye on the worker to see that he follows directions. Management by objectives expects a lot of creativity from workers—and offers them considerable dignity.

A manager, whether in a ball-bearing manufacturer or in a large church, should spend hours placing people in the job to match their strengths, helping them to define their objectives, finding the resources they need to work effectively. Management is largely about people, not so much about their feelings as their effectiveness. Drucker’s unstated assumption is that the best thing you can offer a person is the chance to contribute to a worthwhile cause.

Organizations exist to meet needsDrucker’s understanding of business is also humane. He has never accepted profit as a goal for any enterprise. Rather, profit is a necessity—for without an adequate margin of profit, business cannot survive, or if it survives, cannot grow and innovate. Profit is always a means to an end, never an end.

Nor does business, in Drucker’s mind, exist to make and sell things. Business exists to meet human needs. Drucker’s starting place for management is very simple but also very stimulating: you have to define what needs you will meet, and how.

Drucker’s unstated assumption is that the best thing you can offer a person is the chance to contribute to a worthwhile cause.

One of Drucker’s examples is the emergency room of a hospital. “It took us a long time to come up with the very simple and (most people thought) too obvious statement that the emergency room was there to give assurance to the afflicted . …In a good emergency room, the function is to tell eight out of ten people there is nothing wrong that a good night’s sleep won’t take care of. … Translating that mission statement into action meant that everybody who comes in is now seen by a qualified person in less than a minute. That is the mission; that is the goal. The rest is implementation. Some people are immediately rushed to intensive care, others get a lot of tests, and yet others are told: ‘Go back home, go to sleep, take an aspirin, and don’t worry. If these things persist, see a physician tomorrow.’ But the first objective is to see everybody, almost immediately—because that is the only way to give assurance.”

Another Drucker favorite is from Sears, which around 1900 built a hugely successful business on the premise that it was their “mission to be the informed and responsible buyer for the American farmer.” Note the surprise: not to sell to the American farmer, but to buy for—and to buy well.

Broadly, then, management is ministry for helping people. It helps its employees to make a contribution to something worthwhile. It helps those outside its organization by identifying and meeting their needs. In the largest sense, Drucker defined management as a ministry for saving our society—not, probably, from damnation, but certainly from despair. For if management does not do its work well, a society of organizations will not function. It will not meet human needs. The result will be frustration and an opening to totalitarianism.

Given this humane framework, it was inevitable that church and parachurch leaders read Drucker and found much they could apply to their work—especially as their ministries grew into organizations. Leo Bartel, a Catholic diocesan administrator in Illinois, tells of going to a Leadership Network weekend where he first heard Drucker speak. “My impression of management in the business style equated to ruthlessness, getting the job done at any cost. Peter’s whole outlook was eminently Christian. He showed great concern for the enterprise and the folks in the enterprise. He spoke from principle rather than expediency. He dealt with the human condition in a compassionate as well as a very practical way.” Bartel got his hands on Drucker’s management tapes and never looked back.

Church leaders discovered Drucker—but would Drucker have discovered them? Perhaps not, except that Drucker was also discovering a fundamental problem of modern society that business could not solve.

The problem of communityFrom the very beginning of his work, Drucker understood that the growth of industry had torn people out of community. Where once, as farmers or tradesmen or craftsmen, they worked within their community, now they spend the most important part of their day working with people who don’t live in their neighborhood or go to their church or know their family. Industry efficiently produces goods, but it just as efficiently destroys traditional communities.

Yet community is a fundamental need for humans. That’s why, when Drucker wrote about gm in his first large-scale study of an organization, he recommended that companies try to create a “plant community,” in which ordinary workers have significant control over the environment in which they work. He also recommended a guaranteed annual wage, to create the job security that would help workers to identify with the company. His idea was to create community on and around the job. Such recommendations went nowhere in the post-World War II corporate world, but ironically were recognized and accepted, with modifications, in Japan. Drucker be came a renowned adviser to Japan’s economic miracle. Its “lifelong job” and emphasis on worker morale owe much to Drucker’s thinking.

He has long since realized, however, that community will not come from business. In an era of downsizing and outsourcing, the “plant community” has become almost laughable. “Fifty years ago I believed the plant community would be the successor to the community of yesterday. I was totally wrong. We proved totally incapable [of that] even in Japan. The reason is that everybody does the same job. What holds them together is what they do from nine to five, and not what they aspire for, what they live for, what they hope for, what they die for. That’s a community.”

Drucker never took seriously the possibility that government could provide community. He thought that the more we ask of government, the more frustrated we will feel. If government can’t do it, and business can’t do it, who can? Drucker shifted his hopes to nonprofit organizations. He doesn’t think it’s accidental that the nonprofit sector is growing rapidly, or that voluntarism has increased. They expand to meet a dramatically growing need for community. Drucker goes so far as to say, in his book Managing the Nonprofit Organization, “The non-profits are the American community.” Nonprofits give disengaged workers a place to make a contribution through serving others. They draw rich and poor into a web of common concern.

Churches play a particularly critical role. “The community … needs a community center. … I’m not talking religion now, I’m talking society. There is no other institution in the American community that could be the center.” Drucker gladly stresses the church’s spiritual mission, but he notes that churches also have a societal role. That’s what he meant when he told Forbes that pastoral megachurches are “surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years.”

Our society is extraordinarily cutthroat, Drucker says. Children are pressured to succeed from the time they are very young. “The knowledge society—with a social mobility that threatens to become rootlessness, with its ‘other half’ [of under-educated citizens], its dissolution of the ties of farm and small town and their narrow horizons, needs community. … It needs a sphere where freedom is not just being passive, not just being left alone … a sphere that requires active involvement and responsibility.”

“There is an enormous need to build … I call it the person,” Drucker told a gathering of church leaders. “That’s more than self-respect; it’s also the awareness that there is something beyond you, and something beyond the moment, and something that is not only greater than you but different from you. That is why what you are doing in the churches is so incredibly important.”

Knowledge and knowledge workersDrucker perceives a new form of society struggling to get out of its chrysalis, with churches and other nonprofits playing a new and central role. The key ingredient to this new society is knowledge, Drucker says. The agricultural and industrial revolutions depended on brute strength, raw materials, land, machinery, and capital. In our era, it is the increase of knowledge (including the management skills to make use of it) that explains nearly all current economic development. “The comparative advantage that now counts is in the application of knowledge—for example, in Japan’s total quality management, lean manufacturing processes, just-in-time delivery, and price-based costing,” wrote Drucker in the Atlantic Monthly. The most economically important workers are “knowledge workers”—those who possess an expertise, whether brain surgery or systems analysis, youth culture or marketing, that makes them a necessary (and often scarce) commodity. Today, Drucker says, they make up the largest single group in the work force. “They differ fundamentally from any group in history that has ever occupied the leading position.”

Drucker has invested much energy in understanding how “knowledge workers” can be managed in “information-based organizations.” The hospital is an example Drucker often uses, where doctors and nurses and technicians, all specialists knowing far more about their work than anyone in management, are organized in a fairly “flat” structure to work together. “Knowledge, especially advanced knowledge, is always specialized. By itself it produces nothing.” Management is therefore not less important among knowledge workers, but more. Everything depends on highly trained people who know very little about each other’s work learning to work fluidly and efficiently together. Drucker writes, frighteningly, “The health maintenance organization is an attempt—a first and so far very tentative, and none too successful attempt—to bring the entire process of health care delivery under partnership management . …And what the HMO is attempting to do in health care delivery will have to be done in many other areas” (Forbes).

“I have a strong suspicion that the church is growing stronger, precisely because you go by choice.”

Knowledge workers need the church and other nonprofits more than ever, because their jobs are so specialized and their placement so mobile that they have little connection with community. At the same time, churches and nonprofits are part of the knowledge society. Churches have been transformed just as much as industry. First, the pastoral staffs of large and midsized churches are increasingly specialized. The minister to single adults is a knowledge worker, not just because he went to seminary, but because he has an expert familiarity with singles culture. Second, church members—who actually do the work of the church—are highly educated. They may know more than the pastor about many aspects of their ministry—whether it involves tutoring programs, contemporary music, or Christian education. Lay people are knowledge workers. The pastor, as manager, has to identify their strengths and specialization, place them and equip them for service, and enable them to work in the harmonious and productive whole known as the body of Christ.

“The knowledge worker,” Drucker says, “is … a colleague and an associate rather than a subordinate. He has to be managed as such.” Or as Catholic pastor Leo Bartel told Drucker of his church’s volunteers, “They are no longer helpers. They are partners.”

Pastoral churchesOver the last 20 years Drucker has had a good deal of interaction with what he calls “pastoral” churches. These include megachurches like Bill Hybels’s Willow Creek or Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community. Bob Buford’s Leadership Network has invited Drucker to speak to conferences of large-church leaders and has linked him to many pastors seeking advice.

Drucker calls these pastoral churches because their size is not nearly so significant to him as their orientation around meeting needs. They find their guiding light not from church tradition or doctrine so much as their analysis of their target audience. Hybels is a leading example: before beginning Willow Creek, he went door-to-door asking unchurched people why they didn’t attend church, and then built Willow Creek around their answers. Pastoral churches waste no time regretting a changing world, but see change as their opportunity for ministry. This is precisely the approach that Drucker has urged on businesses and nonprofits for decades. In many ways, pastoral churches echo the management thinking that Drucker has long emphasized.

Drucker sees these pastoral megachurches as an enormous success. They have, he believes, revitalized the church, demonstrating its relevance to a knowledge society.

Church consultant Lyle Schaller, a Drucker admirer, cautions that Drucker’s exposure to megachurches gives him a skewed perspective. Most churches have fewer than a hundred members, Schaller says. Their main goal is survival. They are too small and too lacking in resources to look much beyond themselves.

That caveat serves to highlight the kind of perspective Drucker brings. He doesn’t accurately reflect the whole landscape. He’s not interested in statistics. His vision picks out signs of hope amidst the burning rubble. His feats of optimism find opportunity where others see only shattered remains. That’s how Drucker thinks about community in America today. He sees the losses, but he wastes no time bemoaning them. Rather, he points to ways in which the past can be transcended. Regarding community, Drucker points out that now people choose what community to belong to. They choose whether or not to attend church, rather than attending because of conformist pressures. “I have a strong suspicion that the church is growing stronger, precisely because you go by choice,” Drucker says. He believes that the surge of American voluntarism—a phenomenon unique in the world, he says—represents a felt conclusion that people must make their own solutions, taking personal responsibility to build community rather than looking to government or to social theories. This sense of personal responsibility, he says, is a remarkably hopeful sign. Nonprofits must recognize and use it.

That’s management, as Drucker teaches it—seeing and seizing opportunities in new situations, mobilizing and organizing people to meet them. Good management is not inevitable, but it is possible. Human strengths can overcome human weaknesses. Drucker has dedicated his life to seeing that they do.

“I knew at once,” Drucker wrote of his discovery of Kierkegaard in 1928, “that my life would not and could not be totally in society, that it would have to have an existential dimension which transcends society. … Still, my work has been totally in society.”

It is no accident that some of the people Drucker admires most, to judge from his writings, are managers of large businesses and pastors of large churches. These are consistently people with a vivid sense of the reality of the human world. They rarely have time for theories that don’t produce results.

Such a practical perspective can lead Christian leaders into mere marketing and packaging, in fact into greed and competitive one-upmanship. Drucker won’t point you that way, though. His questions—what are we trying to do? What needs are we competent to meet?—go too deep to be answered glibly. And in the background, always, is his deep moral concern: we must work well on earth, lest destroyers like Hitler and Stalin get a foothold to do their work. Heaven and hell may not always be at risk. But human suffering and despair certainly are.

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