At The Annual Fall Rally, Burtness proclaims . . .
Yes, He Really Is
Charging that the "primary crisis in the Church-at-large and in the ELCA is the failure of nerve about the centrality of Jesus Christ," Dr. James Burtness led the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL) in a theologically profound study of what it means to "confess Jesus Christ as LORD." Burtness, who is a world-renowned scholar on the life of the Nazi martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and professor of Theology at Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MR, spoke at the annual FOCL Reformation Rally in Good Shepherd Church in Sacramento.
Burtness asserted: "Jesus Christ is being pushed out of the center of the church by people who do theology and who ought to know better." He told the assembly that in every controversy about religious truth, "When push comes to shove, Lutherans go with the Scriptures."
Judgmental vs. Making Judgments
In a question and answer period, Burtness forthrightly defended groups like FOCL for calling the church back to faithfulness to its confession. He reminded his listeners, "There is a big difference between making judgments and being judgmental. The Church of Jesus Christ must confess Christ's centrality. That is making a judgment, but it is not being judgmental." [See his extended address in the accompanying article on page 3. Readers are reminded that a video tape of his address may be secured for $12 from the FOCL editorial officeat3707Chamberlain Way, Carmichael, CA 95608. Readers are urged lo use it in their congregations for Adult Education sessions on the foundations of our Lutheran faith.]
Other Speakers
Among the Rally speakers was Mrs. Lola Brekke, Sierra Pacific Synod Council member. She introduced Mrs. Dee Poscy, president of the Synod's Women of the ELCA [see below for selected remarks from Mrs. Posey's stirring address}.
Dr. Herbert Schaefer, founder of the communist-persecuted 1.5 million member Mekane Yesus Lutheran Church of Ethiopia, also addressed the rally. He pleaded with the ELCA "to recognize the presence of Christ in your life, and to look at how you hold to the Bible as the inspired Word – so that you can say, 'Thus saith the Lord,' and so that you can agree in your own life with the Apostle that, 'The Word of God is ALIVE!'" (Hebrews 4: 12).
Schaefer and his wife, Trudy, together with Ascension Lutheran Church, Citrus Heights, California, were called to the podium to be recognized by Mr. Alan Waite, treasurer of FOCL, "for their exemplary benevolent support." Waite also announced that the Aid Association for Lutherans, the largest fraternal benevolent society in the U.S., had subsidized the cost of the Reformation Rally.
As the rally's master of ceremonies. Mr. David Bunn, agribusinessman from Salinas, and vice-president of FOCL. pointed out that since its beginning in 1988, FOCL has existed for one purpose, "that biblical and confessional faithfulness would again characterize the ELCA." The president of FOCL, Pastor Gordon Selbo, noted that supporters of FOCL had flown in for the rally from as far away as Lake Elsinore in Southern California.
FOCL Leads in the fight for the Church to Remain Faithful
The President of our Synod's Women of the ELCA, Dee Posey, electrified her Rally audience with her forthright call to biblical faithfulness. Some of her comments: "I'm concerned the way Scripture is being twisted to make everyone comfortable – this is Humanism; and because of it, we are in some places now being called, "The New Age Lutheran Church' . . . I'm concerned that pastors don’t face the issues. Jesus confronted people. Did Martin Luther stay silent? – He was one of the greatest rabble rousers of his time . . . I take theologians to task for changing the words of Scripture – when did you last hear a sermon that says the devil is real and exists . . . My daughter was abruptly dismissed from her questioning of a pastor with, 'God's Word is neither black nor while, but gray – maybe with my Bible I'm reading a different book!!... I was raised in another denomination, and I found in the ELCA my theology, but now I feel betrayed . . . I thank FOCL for leading in this fight for the Church to remain faithful."
GRACE OR QUOTA?
By Albert P Stauderman*
The Joint Commission for a New Lutheran Church (JCLU) became the architects for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Faced with a decision between Law and Gospel, they chose the Law. They proposed a quota system intended to insure righteousness in every elective process in the ELCA. But "if righteousness comes by the Law, then Christ has died in vain."
As written into the governing documents of the ELCA, every elective body from top to bottom must be composed of men and women in equal numbers; 40 per cent clergy and 60 per cent laity; and 10 per cent of these must be people of color or of a language other than English. Besides being cumbersome, these provisions do not reflect the actual com position of the ELCA membership. They tilt the balance in favor of women and of racial and linguistic minorities. Discriminated against most are white male clergy.
This arrangement became firmly entrenched into our church because the original Joint Commission on Lutheran Unity (JCLU) was deliberately "stacked" in favor of minorities. Every election under the system has added to this imbalance. Maybe this is what God wants for His church, but it's hard to find any justification for it in the Scriptures Of in the Lutheran confessions!
Quotas Reflect on My Faith
I am averse to quotas because they are a reflection on my Christian faith. As a Christian, I should be motivated by grace to act out of love, a love that encompasses all people regardless of sex, race or ethnic origin. The Lord told Paul, "My grace is sufficient for you."
Quotas, however, tell me that love is inadequate! Yet the history of our church in the western hemisphere indicates that the love of Christ docs control Lutherans in their relationships. Already from the 17th century onward, Dutch pastors in the Virgin Islands went out into the fields to minister to slaves and to bring them the Gospel. Long before there was an ELCA, Lutherans reached out to Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and people from the Orient. "Multi-cultural ministry" is not a new concept!
The fact remains that our church is overwhelmingly of northern European background. In the American melting pot, congregations were gradually assimilated into an English-speaking culture. While some continued to serve specific ethnic groups, the trend has been away from isolation by language or national origin and towards a unified church. While there were once many German-, Norwegian-, Swedish-, Danish-, Finnish-, Slovak-, Wendish-and Icelandic-Lutheran designations, these distinctions have largely vanished. We have emphasized the "Lutheran" and dropped the hyphenations.
Of course we have fallen short. Old prejudices arc hard to overcome. Some may still feel that God speaks only German or Norwegian. We need always to repent and remind ourselves of the command to make disciples of all people. But we can reach out only with love and the Gospel, because the Law never empowers us toward this goal.
In returning these divisive elements to the church by adding distinctions between the sexes and between clergy and laity, the ELCA has contributed to a spirit of factionalism. The intentions may have been good, but the result has been disastrous.
Quotas at Work
In an apparent effort to justify the large minority percentage on the church's staff and elective boards, the first convention in 1988 adopted a resolution urging that within ten years, 10 per cent of the church's membership be minority persons. Six years later, it appears that this goal may hemorceasily achieved by adecline in majority memberships than by again of minorities. Membershipof persons ofcoloror of those using a language other than English has remained below two per cent. But total church membership has continued to slip. Perhaps more significantly, congregations and synods have retained more of their income for local purposes, requiring drastic cutbacks in churchwidc programs.
The emphasis on minorities has produced some alarming byproducts.
The traditional development of mission congregations to preserve the church relationship of those who move to new communities has slowed to a crawl. For many years in the life of the ELCA's predecessor churches, establishment of such missions was the chief method of retaining or increasing church membership. Now mission establishment is disproportionately directed toward "minority" ministries which grow slowly. Instead of adding to "inclusiveness," this seems to be a way of excluding ùbut not replacingùthe historic constituency of the church.
Frustrating Change
Leaders of the church have been frustrated and handicapped by the quota system and its problems. According to the frank and unrefuted account given by Edgar R. Trexler in his Anatomy of a Merger, the seeds for the quota system were sown in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee for Lutheran Unity (CLU). There, demands from a Black or "trans-cultural" pressure group were voiced by Dr. Will Hertzfeld of the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churchesùa predecessor to the ELCA.
This disconcerted the meeting, since approaches from other outside bodies had been rejected. But before the meeting was over, the CLU had wearily agreed to forming the 70 member JCLU of which one-sixth (16.6 per cent) would be "minorities". In this group of three church bodies, where less than two per cent of the membership was classed as "minority", the imbalance was thus already established.
Protests were brushed aside. An informal poll taken by church periodicals showed that 60 per cent of the church members who responded were opposed to the quota system. But the JCLU, as offspring of the system, refused to budge. Opposition continued right up to the simultaneous meetings of the three church bodies in August, 1986. At that time each church hesitated to lake any action that might derail the merger. But within three years after the formation of the ELCA, more than 20 of its 65 synods asked that quotas be reconsidered.
Discontent reached to the pointùat the fifth anniversary Assembly of the ELCA at Orlando in 1993ùthat a resolution was adopted instructing the ELCA's Church Council to search for alternatives to quotas and to report to the 1995 Assembly.
Fortunately, the church is a living and moving entity. Nothing stays the same forever. Structural realignments have already been made, although largely to adjust to the reduced income. But at the time of the ELCA's organization, Dr. David Preus, president of the predecessor American Lutheran Church predicted that a major reorganization would be needed within 10 years.
Two years later, Dr. James Crumley, former president of the merging Lutheran Church in America, blasted quotas. He said, "The system is not serving us well, and should be discontinued." Although compelled by his position to support the system, ELCA Bishop Chilstrom has called quotas "a time-bound commitment on the part of the church. I would hope that we can move to a place where we do not need them any more."
Some of us feel that we never needed them, and that we should promptly give the church back to the Holy Spirit, whose guidance might very well prove more effective than the legalism of quotas.
* Dr. Stauderman is the distinguished former editor of The Lutheran, the official publication of the United Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church in America, and now the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He lives in Singer island, FL.
All In the Name of Jesus
by James Burtness
I want to thank you for the work that you do in the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCI,)- It's extremely important.
I decided to call this little presentation "Doing Everything in the Name of the Lord Jesus" (Colossians 3: 17). Colossae was a Christian congregation, but it didn't get things quite right. These people thought that God and the world were separated by intermediary beings, and that Jesus was one such. Jesus was divine to the Colossians, but not "God of God, Light of light, True God of True God," as we say in our Nicene Creed every Sunday.
So everything was in confusion, and Paul, in writing to them, decided no! to argue the point but simply to proclaim Jesus Christ. He said, "All things were made in, through and for Christ. All things hold together in Christ. Everything is reconciled to God by the blood of Christ's cross." (Col.l: 15-20).
Then Paul says, "Whatever you do, do it because everything holds together in Christ. Do everything you do in the name of the Lord Jesus." That's our theme.
An Important Word
You are the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans. Confessional – It's an important word. I want to say something about that word and about the situation today in which we are called upon to confess the name of Jesus.
The Greek word for "confess" is homologeo. It means to speak together, to say the same word. Confession is something the Church says corporately. It's very important for the testimony and life of our Church to ''say the same word." In our common worship we hear, "Let us confess our sin;" and "Let us confess our faith."
We "speak together" the word of repentance, we confess our sins. We speak together the word of faith, the response to our sinfulness. I think the Lutheran Church is beginning to catch on to how important that term "confession" is – maybe, partly, because of your work in FOCL.
At Luther .Seminary we have a series of courses under the theme, "Interpreting and Confessing." We "interpret" in order to confess, lo confess our sin, and to confess our faith. In every Lutheran Church of which I've been a part, the constitution says something about allegiance to the Scriptures and to the Confessions. We've used those two together. They "interpret" one another. And we have traditionally said that both arc normative for our faith and life as Lutherans.
We know what's normative because it's set forth in the Scriptures and Confessions. They are both normative but we have a made adistinction. We have said that the Scriptures are the "norming norm" and the Confessions are the "normed norm." That is, if pushcomes to shove we Lutherans go with the Scriptures, although we do believe the Confessions and the Scriptures are in harmony.
Lutherans then talk about the Formal Principle of the Reformation, i.e., the primary, the final authority of Scripture. They speak also about the Material Principle of the Reformation, namely, justification by grace alone through faith. These also are ways for expressing the richness and themany textured character of that wonderful word confession.
Biblical Confession
The word "confess" starts in the New Testament. PaulsaysinRomans 10:9,"Ifyou confess with your lipsùI want to hear it, Paul says, it's not something you keep inside. I want to hear itù-if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved!"
Philippians 2 looks forward to the "time whenever)' knee will bend and every tongue – again, let me hear it, – every tongue confess, that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God, the Father."
According to I Corinthians 12, thepeoplc were all upset about various spiritual gifts. They were fighting about it, and wrole lo Paul, "Who's right?" Paul wrote back. "Lets get this straight. No one says Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit; and no one saysùlet me hear it, move yourlips now – no one can say that Jesus is cursed, if he has the Holy Spirit." The test of the presence of the Holy Spirit, Paul says, in 1 Corinthians: 12-14, is not ecstatic, but confessional. The earliest Chrislian confession was "Jesus is Lord," the way of finding out whether you're aChristian or not.
Also for us. We tell who is Christian, not by chasing after a person and finding out what his or her behavior is, although behavior is not unimportant. We find out by hearing the confession, "Jesus is Lord."
That confession was heard wonderfully in the early church, because the Roman Emperor demanded that people say. "Caesar is Lord." Caesar claimed to be God. For a Christian Gcnlilclo say, "Jesus isLord" meant exaclly that; Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. No one said that lightly.
Also for the Christian Jew. For him the word, "God" carried God's presence. When the Jew saw God's name "Jehovah" in print, he felt that the name bore the presence of God to such an extent that it would be wrong to put that holy name on human sinful lips. So when the Jew saw the word "God," he substituted the word "Lord.''For the Christian Jew to say "Jesus is Lord," meant that Jesus was one with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. No Jew said that lightly, either.
Confession was very much tied lo the particular time and circumstances in which Christianity arose. That's why Paul can say, "If you confess (both Jew and Greek) wilh your lips thai Jesus is Lord, and you believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, you'll be saved."
The word confess is a verb. It's something we do, we do together. We confess our sin. We confess our faith. We confess that Jesus is Lord.
Confessing the Creeds
Later came the Apostles' Creed, whose Second Article is about Jesus. The Creed's doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a Christ-centered doctrine. When we confess our faith in the words of the creed we are confessing "Jesus is Lord'" in an expanded way.
A person by the name of Arius (256-336 AD) began lo proclaim a very different doctrine. He said that while God exists, there are also many kinds of divine beings, such as angels, and including Jesus. Jesus is divine. But not quite equal with the real God. So Arius said about Jesus, "There was a lime when he was not."
Christians responded, "That doesn't square with what the Bible says: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God' (John 1:1). Something is wrong here!" Athanasias, the Patriarch of Alexandria, took Arius on. To combat Arius' heresy, the Nicene Creed was hammered out in 325 AD, confessing that "Jesus is Lord." So we confess that Creed each Sunday, acknowledging "Jesus is God of God. Light of light, Very God of Very God, begotten yes, hut not made, being of one substance with (he Father, by whom all things were made." Confession is a verb. We do it in particular limes, and in particular contexts, in particular ways.
By the 16th century, the Doctrine of the Trinity was fairly well established and there was no real argument between Luther and Rome as to whether God is Triune. Instead, the argument had to do with salvation by works or by grace. Accordingly, \heLuihcranAugsburg Confession moves quickly to Article 2, Original Sin. If you're going to explain grace and salvation, you have to talk about sin, not about the nature of God.
The final confessional statement about what Lutherans believe. The Formula of Concord (1580 AD) dealt especially with the controversy over the doctrine of "Justification through Faith." Exactly how and why are we made right with God ("justified")? Lutherans said that with this doctrine the Church stands or falls. That was true in the 16th century and it's true today, even though we're not living in exactly the same time, nor undergoing exactly the same crisis that those people were.
Another confessional turning point came with Adolph Hitler. So-called "German-Christians" arose who really hyphenated Nazism with Christianity. People like Dietrich Bonhoeffcr, Martin Nicmoeller, and KarlBarth said it was a time for confessing the name of Jesus clearly. They formed a group called the Confessing Church. They said, "Today, the Anti-Christ is not in Rome. Today the Anti-Christ is in Berlin." They staled their beliefs in the Barmen Confession (1934), an extremely Chris to-centric document.
Confession – we find it all the way through the life of the Church, and for all kinds of reasons. As Christians, it's something we do and should do, even today.
A Failure of Nerve
So, where are we today? I think the primary crisis in thechurch at large today is the failure of nerve about the centrality of Jesus Christ. That's the crisis.
It oozes up all over the place especially through New Ageism. Jesus Christ is being pushed out as the center of the Church.
The really frightening thing about this is, it is being done by very, very serious, respected people who do theology and who ought to know better. I hate to mention these names because some of these people are my friends. James Gustafson, for instance, chose to entitle his great final work, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective. Sounds good! Let's go for God. That's a Reformation theme.
Theocentric, for James Gustafson, however, turns out not to be Christocentric. He says that Christocentricily is just another way of talking about an thropo-centricity. Jesus of Nazareth is another human being and we can’t make him the center of our thought. We have to make God the center.
The Bible becomes, in Gustafson's hands, only the charter document of the Christian movement. But the "charter document of the Christian movement" is a long way from being the Word of God. When we read Ihc Bible, we have to practice "the hermeneutics of selective retrieval", says Gustafson.
That means you can relieve some good stuff from those documents, but you have to be very careful. You also find some good stuff in the Koran, some good stuff in the Bahagda-Vcdas, some good stuff in the Bible. Mix it up and you get theo-centricity. Of course, there's a lot of junk in the Bible that you don't retrieve, he adds, so you just leave that behind. Suddenly the whole of the Confessions is down the drain.
Recently John Cobb gave two lectures entitled "Jesus to Chrisl" and "From Christ to God." Sounds great. Jesus the Christ, the one who leads us to God. Sounds great – except that's not what he meant.
He meant, go from Jesus of Nazareth to the idea of Christ. And it turns out that for Cobb, the idea of Christ means whatever is supremely important. It's a kind of getting to God without Jesus and without Christ. Jesus is being shoved off the center.
Then we have Krister Stendahl, a former Lutheran Bishop of Sweden, spoke to the American Academy of Religion about Christianity and religious pluralism. He said that we have to have a Copernican revolution, whereby we move from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe. Stcndahl said, "We Christians have had Christ at the center of the universe, but we need a revolution so that God is at the center of the universe." Then Christ is one of the many planets out there along with Buddha and Krishna and so on. When he got through everybody clapped. How sad.
No Other God
This is a failure of nerve about the centrality of Jesus Chrisl, even among fine Christian people. They have soaked up the nonsensical ooze of this New Age Religion, and suddenly, Christ is off to the side, and they still think that some how or other they're going to find God.
Christians know no God other than in the person of Jesus Christ. That this is throughout the New Testament. My suggestion is that in our time and in our place we look again to our confession and if we are losing our nerve about the centrality of Jesus Christ then we ought to read ColossiansandEphesians. There Paul just hammers it home. "He is the first born of all creation, the first born from the dead. In Him all things were made, in heaven and on earth, principalities, powers, authorities, all things were made through Him. And in Him all things hold together. He is the head of the church, the Beginning and the End. All things are reconciled to God through Him, all things in the universe."
A Christocentric universe, reconciled to God through the blood of his crossùthat is the message of the Lutheran Confessions, and indeed, it is a confession from which we too must never waver.
Perspectives
It has always amazed your editor lhal those most removed from Ihc issue are the first to volunteer solutions. Who knows better how children arc to be brought up than the never married?
Is it necessary, for instance, for Jews to accept Y'shua as their Savior and the Cross as their means of salvation? Far from the agony of the choice, Gentile theological professors and main-line bishops torture passages like Romans 9-11 and opine that since Jews are of the Covenant Chosen People, they will be able to slip into heaven without acknowledging God's Messiah.
Yet Jews who bow the knee to Christ know otherwise. They confess gladly from their experience with Jesus, "There is salvation in no one else for there is no other name under heaven whereby we must be saved." That remarkable '"little minister." Eddie Spircr, whose astonishing service to American Luthcranism has recently been put in inspirational book form by the Rev. Ross Hidy, was one such. He reluctantly but decisively accepted renunciation by his family for the sake of Christ. Any subscriber to the Jews for Jesus Newsletter is acquainted monthly with accounts of Jewish Christians who give up everything "in order to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering."
Madalyn Murray O’Hare's Boy
Or, we remember a 14 year old lad, William. Goaded by his mother. Madalyn Murray [0' Hare], he fought Baltimore's school system all the way through the Supreme Court, demanding lhal prayers and Bible reading be outlawed from the public schools of America. In 1963 he won, and we have been reaping the harvest of morally blind, ignorant, out-of-control social behavior ever since.
According to The Lutheran (7/94), those far from the issue, i.e., the Bishop of the ELCA and 400 other clergy, "have joined together in a campaign opposing the Religious Right and its effort to restore state-sponsored prayer in public schools." The reason they gave as they circularized the nation's school superintendents and school board presidents in an open letter was. "...government involvement in, or promotion of, religious practice, inevitably politicizes religion and harms religious freedom".
What does the one closest to the issue think about it, now that he has seen the effects of his action, as they plague our land? William Murray wrote a letter of apology to the people of Baltimore, published in the Baltimore Sun, asking forgiveness for "whatever part 1 played in the removal of Bible reading and praying from the public schools of that city. I now realize the value of this great tradition and the importance it has played in the past m keeping America a moral and lawful country. I can now see the damage this removal has caused to our nation in the form of loss of faith and moral decline. Being raised as an atheist in the home of Madalyn O'Hare I was not aware of faith or even the existence of God. As I now look back over 33 years of life wasted without faith in God, I pray only that I can, with His help, right some of the wrong and evil I have caused through my lack of faith. Our nation, our people, now face a trying time in this world of chaos. It is only with a return to our traditional values and our faith in God that we will be able to survive as a people." [Find the whole letter and his electrifying saga from militant atheism to humble Christianity in William Murray: My Life Without God, Harvest House Publishers, Eugene, OR, 1992.]'
WHO KNOWS BEST?
How bizarre: Our ELCA is invited by its infamous Human Sexuality document to endorse condom distribution as a "moral imperative", and then joins lo protest students calling upon their Maker in our public schools.
Three Every Minute
And while we're loo king at anomalies, ponder the sudden galvanizing of the media for relief efforts in Rwanda when thePresident worked out the mathematics that one person every minute was dying in that tragic land. Would that he had also worked out the math that in our own land, three persons every minute are dying in the wombs of aborting mothers, in a holocaust that goes on year by relentless year.
Sacrificing [for] Our Children
Yes, Virginia, .some great ideas can originate out of Arkansas. Its Lt. Governor, Mike Huckabee said: "Where once everyone agreed that, if necessary, mothers and fathers ought to be prepared to lay down their lives for their kids, now we lay down our kids' lives, for no more pressing reason than that they are girls rather than boys. Pro-lifers believe that mothers and fathers ought to sacrifice for their children, not sacrifice their children."
Follow the Directions
In our last issue, Dr. Bragstad reminded us of a modern proverb, applicable in our church: "II" all else fails; read the directions!" Can we admit that most social, economic and psychological guesses about successful living arc tragic failures? If so, we could turn back to the place our Church once said it would find its directions: "the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments." St. John of Damascus said it like this: "We do not change theeverlasting boundaries which our own fathers have set, but we keep the tradition just as we received it." If all else fails, we could turn back and read those directions again.
To help us, an outstanding Bible-centered study conference is presentedyearly by iheLutheranBible Institute inCalifornia. Featuring internationally famous lecturers like Dr. Frank Scilhamer, George Forell, Heiko Oberman, and Canadian Bishop Robert Jacobson, this year's program at Grace Church, Hunlington Beach, will hear the Chair of the ELCA's Conference of Bishops, Kenneth Sauer, and the eminent author-theologian, Roy Harrisville, Jr. Call LBIC at (714) 262-9222 for more information on the annual Luther and the Bible Conference (January 30-31, 1995).
READER RESPONSES
DEAR EDITOR:
I have been reading with admiration and approval what you have been putting out for some time now, calling attention to the insidious expansion of non- and anti-Biblical points of view in our synod . . . and it finally occurred to me that 1 ought to write you and commend you for what you are doing and encourage you to continue. Keep it up. Falter not.
We who support you are, like the demons you seek to exorcise, legion in number! We applaud your positive stance, clean and uncluttered, calling attention to the creeping abuse and paralysis all around us, and doing so without hysteria – sharp, incisive, challenging. Keep it up!
Enclosed is a small gift to help cover a small portion of the costs your are incurring.
Dr. James Kallas Thousand Oaks, CA
DEAR EDITOR:
We are far from perfect. But this does not mean that homosexuality and abortion are right, or have "rights." Our friends can do wrong and can be forgiven. But we will not agree with them when they teach wrongly. Thanks for the good article in the Spring, 1994, issue: "The Womb, the Closet and the Cross."
Pastor Larry and Leona Reyelts Minneapolis, MN