Page 4432 – Christianity Today (2024)

Helping hands:
The Jobs Partnership program
helps welfare
dependents get
a new start—
after opening
their sessions
with prayer.

In 1996 Inez Fleming considered welfare reform a good idea, but she worried that it might be a case of weaning the baby off the bottle a little too quickly. Fleming, the 52-year-old Community Ministry Coordinator at Strategies to Elevate People (STEP) in inner-city Richmond, Virginia, has been a mom, an exhorter, and a friend to women on welfare in Gilpin Court, Richmond’s

largest public housing project, since 1994. “Some of these women had great-grandmothers, grandmothers, and mothers never working, and the government was saying they had one year to go to work. I just thought it was too fast.” Fleming, however, has been pleasantly surprised by the results she’s witnessed firsthand. “Even though the women were forced to go to work, it gave them a sense of ‘Wow! Me? I can do that?’ I’ve had girls tell me, ‘I wouldn’t have gotten up and [done] it on my own.’ “

It appears that not only has welfare reform nudged the unemployed to work, it has also pushed churches to step up their involvement in community ministry among the poor. Since federal reforms were passed in the summer of 1996, a few thousand churches have begun welfare-to-work mentoring programs. Over 800 congregations have been trained to mentor welfare recipients through South Carolina’s “Putting Families First” program; over 400 are mentoring the poor in Texas’s “Family Pathfinders” program; and in Mississippi, which boasts the nation’s first state wide effort to mobilize churches to “adopt” welfare recipients, over 850 congregations are at work.

Mentoring programs involving from 5 to 50 churches each are also under way in Michigan, Virginia, Mary land, California, Washington, Indiana, and North Carolina. But the initiative Inez Fleming is the most excited about is the mentoring program housed at her own congregation, Sharon Baptist. The 800-member, primarily middle-class African-American church sits within two blocks of Gilpin.

Two years ago, Fleming and then-STEP executive director Linda Tracey met with Sharon’s senior pastor, Paul Coles, and described STEP’s work in Gilpin. They had run children’s programs and aged course in the community for several years but switched to an emphasis on job-readiness training. Imitating a successful initiative from Raleigh, North Carolina, STEP launched its “Jobs Partnership” program in 1997.

Jobs Partnership has three components: a 15-week, biblically based life-skills course, mentoring by church volunteers, and job counseling and placement services. STEP had been receiving strong support for years from one African-American Pentecostal congregation in Gilpin, Victory Life Fellowship, but was hoping Sharon Baptist would also join the effort.

Says Pastor Coles: “They made me realize that I am right on the back door of Gilpin. Awareness is the key. Sometimes we get so accustomed to a condition that we get ‘turned off’ from it, like living near the airport and you don’t notice the sound of the planes anymore. That’s what happened to Sharon. We were right in the middle of poverty, but we were overlooking it.”

Inez Fleming was astonished at the rapidity of Coles’s response. “When Linda and I talked with him, he said, ‘I like what I’m hearing.’ And the next thing I know, he was teaching in the class, joining the board of directors, and swinging wide Sharon’s doors.”

“I just caught the fire,” he responds. “I knew Christ was in it. I watched the interaction between the church volunteers [from] STEP and the people from Gilpin. It was a true expression of love that looked beyond the racial and economic standing of the people. The love really impressed me, and I knew STEP was for real.

“I guess it also brought a guilt feeling over me,” he says. “I’ve been in the neighborhood all these years and not done anything for the people. And here were these white people from the West End [suburbs] working hard in my community through STEP.”

Under Coles’s leadership, Sharon Baptist has provided 13 mentors and three teachers for the “Jobs Partnership” program; lent its choir for STEP events; given the ministry use of its kitchen; made support for STEP a line item in its budget; and designed and hosted the first ever men-only Jobs Partnership class.

“Our pastor is leading us to put the teaching about loving our fellow man into practice—and beyond the four walls of the church,” explains Narkita Lewis, a lifelong Sharon Baptist member who has mentored two STEP students. Lewis grew up near Gilpin and says her mentoring experience helps her not to forget where she came from. “There’s a stigma attached to living in Gilpin and you’ve got to not believe it,” she says. “You’ve got to get to know the people.”

Lewis’s initial mentoring assignment was with Djuana Coleman, a 30-year-old mother of four who had lived in Gilpin several years. She became a Christian through Inez Fleming’s discipleship and had joined Sharon Baptist. Having sung together in the church choir, Lewis and Coleman were already friends. “Djuana was hungry and thirsty for the Lord, and I knew that if there were anything to be attained through the classes that would help her reach her goals, she would grasp for it and apply it,” Lewis says. “I knew she would succeed with whatever Jobs Partnership could help her with.”

Lewis’s second assignment, a single mother with four kids and a history of drug use, was far tougher. Helen (not her real name) was very strong-willed. “As far as being outspoken, well, sometimes you wished she wasn’t! At the beginning of the program, I believe she and everybody else didn’t think she’d make it past the second or third class. But she surprised us all and made it through the course.” Lewis saw fewer outbursts, consistency in at tending a literacy program, and a spiritual openness in Helen throughout the course. But shortly after graduation, Helen slipped back into using drugs. “I became discouraged,” Lewis admits. “I want her to know I’m still here for her, but I want her to help herself, too.”

Djuana graduated and took a job in nursing the elderly, but Helen gave up after a short job search.

Not counting the 19 students who just graduated, STEP has achieved a 70 percent job-placement rate. It is even higher if graduates with “barriers to entry”—substance abuse, pregnancy, and disabilities—are not counted. Graduates are working in the school system, at daycare centers, and at local factories and universities. Salaries range from $5.15/hour to over $11.00/hour. Only three graduates whom program administrator Tim Coles considers employable are unemployed. “They’ve just refused the opportunities we’ve presented them,” he shrugs.

At the most recent Jobs Partnership graduation, students and mentors processed in pairs down the carpeted center aisle of Northminster Baptist Church. They held lighted candles to signify the students’ new hopes. Students were given an opportunity to speak prior to receiving their graduation certificates, and all praised their mentors. Thomas Whitaker was matched with two men whom he called “the big brothers I never had.” Zelda Mason said that it was knowing her mentor would be there for her each week that made her want to attend the classes. “My mentor called me ‘most every day,” reported Phyllis Oliver. “She inspired me a lot.” Tammy Pryor said her mentor from Sharon had provided transportation to and from every class.

Fleming says the emotional support and encouragement mentors offer are critical. Often the students have been abused. Some have struggled with drugs. Others have poor reading skills and no high-school diploma. Completing the 15-week class is a major accomplishment for them, and it produces remarkable attitudinal change. “Take Tammy Pryor,” she says. “She’s had a rough time. She’s a single mom, and she and her son were involved in a very bad accident recently. She was working at Wal-Mart when she joined the program. She’s ready now to look for another job. That’s something she wasn’t ready for before going through Jobs Partnership. She was ready to settle for anything. But now she’s got that support and encouragement behind her, and she’s saying, ‘Let’s give it a try.’ She’s very confident.”

The students are not the only ones changed by the program. Mentors are, too. Ruth Smith is a Sharon Baptist member who signed up to be a mentor partly because of trials of her own. “I wanted to reach out to somebody else and to take my mind off of myself and [focus] on what I could give to somebody else.” Narkita Lewis adds, “Mentoring is a re warding experience. You get good students, like Djuana, and then you get students like Helen and you say, ‘What am I doing in this situation?’ But at the end, they both come through and they’re both changed, and you are, too.

“They have challenges. You think about yourself in their shoes and know you’d say, ‘Let’s just quit.’ But they keep going. It’s your duty to help them reach for [success] because you know that they can. You can see it in them,” she says. “They have survival in their hearts. If they can survive in Gilpin, they can make it anywhere.”

A casual observer might assume that the mentors from Sharon Baptist, being African-American, could build a more trusting relationship with their students than could white mentors from wealthy suburban churches. Inez Fleming explains that more often it’s just the opposite. She says the white mentors feel they have less to risk. “For them, it’s ‘You don’t know me and you don’t have to see me again. So I can come in and be who I am, and if you don’t like it, I can just go back on the other side of town and you don’t have to see me again.’ ” The African Americans, she says, sometimes feel as though they have to tread more carefully. They are in the neighborhood, she explains, and they feel, “If I step on your toe, I’m going to have to run into you again.” Consequently, the black-on-black relationships seem to take longer to develop.

On top of everything else, the program is also fostering reconciliation among diverse groups. Pastor Coles says, “There are a lot of walls that are erected in ministry—racial walls, denominational walls, social walls. I’ve come to realize that STEP is a vehicle for tearing down these walls and making bridges where we have had gulfs between peoples and denominations for so many years. Our congregation is not only helping the community,” he sums up, “we’re crossing those barriers.”

Amy L. Sherman is an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute and director of Urban Ministries at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her handbook, Establishing a Church-based Welfare-to-Work Mentoring Ministry: A Practical ‘How-To’ Guide, is available by calling 212-599-7000.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

In his book Growing Up Religious, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow describes a typically religious American, Sandra Barton, who goes to church occasionally, who believes there is something or someone “higher than us,” and who believes in heaven, because this life is hellish. For a contrast to the Sandra Bartons, Wuthnow’s team of trained interviewers looked for Americans who would “give a full account of the nature and attributes of God, as well as a doctrine of creation, the origins of evil, the possibilities of redemption, and reasons people should believe in certain tenets about immortality and eschatology.”

“We found no living examples of such people,” writes Wuthnow, despite the fact that their interviews included clergy, PKs, and others trained in religion.

What they did find was that many Americans are focusing on spiritual practice, while ignoring traditional doctrine.

Wuthnow’s researchers should have been at last November’s American Academy of Religion meetings. In a convention that has become a marshy bog of relativism, perhaps 300 people turned out to hear Fuller Seminary President Richard Mouw dialogue with two fellow Calvinists about Infralapsarianism—the belief that the proper order for understanding God’s decrees is Creation, permission of the Fall, election-salvation, and not election-salvation, Creation, permission of the Fall. If that discussion seems arcane, it makes my point: there is increasing anecdotal evidence for a renewed interest in classic Christian belief, even as Americans at large neglect doctrine.

Thanks to a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Christianity Today is able to focus some of its energies on fostering renewed interest in beliefs. One way we hope to do this involves CT‘s research department. As I type this note, our research staff is preparing to mail a questionnaire designed to measure what evangelical Protestants today believe and which beliefs they deem most important. Out of that research, and with the help of the church’s top scholars and writers, we hope to develop a collection of materials to spark a renaissance of interest in classic Christian doctrines.

As evangel-icals, we begin this enterprise with the gospel itself. Preliminary research showed that the gospel of justification by faith still has a high commitment among CT readers: 100 percent declared that it was “essential for an evangelical to believe” that “those whom God saves he justifies by faith through grace alone.”

Given that high commitment, we are pleased to present “The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration” (see p. 49). This document, which has been drafted by leading evangelical thinkers, lays out not only the simplicity of the gospel, but also the complexity of its ramifications. Our hope is that the careful analysis and explication given here will excite new interest in discussing and celebrating the saving love of God—in a way that deepens and focuses our Christian practice.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Along with letters we’ve received commenting on recent articles have been a substantial number reflecting readers’ deep dismay over the shootings in Littleton, Colorado. While many words of self-examination and analysis have been written about this tragedy, Christians seem especially disturbed. For example, commenting on what he called “The Massacre of Values,” Kansas pastor Frederick Kornis observed that “if we are at all sad or concerned about the outrageous behavior of the Trench Coat Mafia and the likes, we must individually confess our own outrageous idolatry of worshiping the secular over the spiritual.” Don’t miss our commentary in this issue’s editorial (“The Long Road After Littleton,” p. 32). And if you missed the CT article by Lt. Col. David Grossman (Aug. 8, 1998, p. 30) on how society is training our children to kill, you can find it on the Web (ChristianityToday.com/ct/8t9).

Good Grief! Funeral Directors Deserve Credit* With a broad brush dipped in tar, Lauren Winner takes a gleeful and slanderous swipe at the local mortician, painting the funeral industry in shades of deception and opportunistic greed [“Death, Inc.,” April 26]. While I can respect Winner’s preference for the do-it-yourself approach to funerals, most folks I deal with as a small-town pastor would rather eat chalk than prepare their dead mother for burial. They deeply appreciate the services offered by a skilled funeral director who is compassionate, honest, and extremely helpful at a time when most folks have all they can do simply to grieve. Funeral directors get called out at all hours of the night, often work around the clock, and are there to assist people in dealing with the most stressful experience in life, the death of a loved one. They deserve to make an honest profit for their work. No doubt there are some crooks in the trade, but Winner is wrong to paint such a bleak picture of a respectable profession.

Harlen D. MenkEllsworth, Wis.

* God uniquely put me in a funeral home as a counselor to families for a year while I was in between ministries. It was not my desire to be there, but I now see the experience as a major training time by the Lord for my role as a pastor. I never saw then, nor in any of the following years since then, any “kick-backs” to pastors or others. I have not seen abusive pressures to sell more expensive caskets or higher priced service (although I am sure that is done—just as I am sure there may be some pastors who take money from the church improperly).

Rev. Milt DavisOxnard, Calif.

Your magazine’s long-established credibility in our minds has been destroyed. This article reflects minimal research and a biased perspective that leads to conclusions that are totally inaccurate and invalid. It is an insult totally unworthy of a publication of your standing.

The cited practice of the writer’s Methodist minister friend is illegal, and I question the ethics of the pastor involved, not only the “undertaker.” They are both wrong, and this is not a normal part of the business.

I am a third generation family funeral director. As a graduate of Wheaton College and the University of Minnesota School of Mortuary Science, I have served my community for more than 45 years and have assisted in arranging and directing more than 15,000 funeral services.

Ralph H. AlbinsonEden Prairie, Minn.

As the early twentieth century gave way to the Depression, my grandfather made his way to a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania by the name of Hyndman. There he met his wife, raised three children, and built a then-small funeral home into a successful, thriving business. He gained the town’s love and respect, not for the position he held, but for the person he was. When I was 8, my family moved to Hyndman, and my father began the work of becoming a funeral director.

Like my grandfather, my father worked hard and was prosperous. But also like my grandfather, his job was his ministry. Many people could not afford the cost of a funeral. For many, he gave his services away: cosmetics, casket, and all. For others, he often lowered the cost. For those who found too late that the price was more than they could pay, he did not collect, took what they offered, helped as he could, and often gave what he had to help them out.

While alive, he served the community as he could. He helped the Lions Club, served on bank and school boards, helped with Boy Scouts, and gave from his prosperity to help those he could find work or get a better education. He was fair and honest in all that he did. He never tried to trick a customer into buying more than they could afford. He was respected by the community more than most will ever be.

The predictable response often comes back that he was the exception. I think the truth is this—the mortician who tricks his customers, rips them off, has no concern for their pressing present needs is the exception.

Matthew J. ZeiglerMountoursville, Pa.

* Winner’s “Death, Inc.” is disappointing. Part book review, part travelogue, part shockless expose, she seems to be saying that most all funeral directors are crooks except some African-American ones who have read certain books that she has read and, if I get her point, one who has written a book she has read—namely me. My black colleagues and I can be trusted, she seems to be saying, because we are literate.

“If you don’t know of any black funeral parlors to patronize,” Winner writes, “you could move to Milford, Michigan, where the poet Thomas Lynch is the undertaker.” Of course, it is nice to meet her threshold for professional conduct. But she doesn’t know me, has never met me, has never been to my funeral home, and, though she has done me the courtesy of “dipping into” my book [The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, 1997], she speaks from no experience, empirical data, or informed source from the community I am accountable to.

The rich diversity of mortuary customs by which ethnic, racial, regional, and denominational identities are affirmed at the same time as our shared grief and common humanity and mortality are articulated makes the funeral one of the few truly cross-cultural rituals our species observes.

If “faction”—imaginable fictions dressed up, repackaged, and resold as fact—is what your publication is looking for, you have found an able apprentice in Winner. She has a gift for speculation and spectacle and storytelling.

Thomas LynchMilford, Mich.

Lauren Winner responds:
Unfortunately, neither Mitford’s research—both for the original American Way of Death and for the revision decades later—nor my anecdotal survey uncovered such earnest accounts of undertakers who served God and their communities. Again, in my experience, funeral homes in African-American communities echo typical black churches with deeper connections to the daily lives and deaths of their people. I am certainly glad to hear these testimonies, which suggest that such connections are more widespread than either Mitford’s book or my forays into the world of funeral homes indicate. Where I have more to learn, I wish to do so.

God, the Bible, and Christian ScienceRegarding Glenn Tinder’s article “Birth of a Troubled Conscience” [April 26]: As a Christian Scientist, I have had more than a fair share of illness, of feelings of guilt and genuine desire for forgiveness and love. Is it irony or kinship with Glenn Tinder that has made Psalm 118:24 a lifeline of joy for me as it did for him? And finding, as Tinder did, that in spite of evil around us, God’s good universe remains intact and we inhabit a day that God made and we can live. In such healing deliverance from evil, Tinder and I share that same sunlight of the blue Pacific Ocean in all its splendor and significance of God’s grace.

Christian Scientists don’t ignore sickness and sin, or avert their eyes and pretend these evils don’t exist. But they do challenge evil’s validity to be stronger than God, a point Tinder himself admits. Why disparage Christian Science for supporting what all Christians in distress do—turn to God and the Bible for help and find healing?

Gail HaslamElsah, Ill.

* I have used Glenn Tinder’s Political Thinking as a supplementary text in my introductory political science courses for more than 15 years. It is an intriguing study of the paradoxes in political theory, made up wholly of questions to which Tinder supplies no final answers. The first question, significantly, is: Are human beings estranged in essence? followed by the second: If not, why are there so many conflicts/divisions among them? Through out the text, the scriptural view of humanity is clearly articulated as one answer to some of these perennial questions. My own premise is that one’s view of human nature relates to one’s view of government.

I assumed Glenn Tinder to be a religious person, but his spiritual autobiography revealed a person much like I am—estranged, reconciled, and redeemed.

Elizabeth CrozierIndiana University/Purdue UniversityIndianapolis, Ind.

I’m writing to correct the impression of Christian Science: Christian Scientists do not ignore sin. It was the teachings of the Bible, as illuminated by Christian Science, and the loving yet firmly moral outlook of individual Christian Scientists that many years ago turned me away from habitual licentiousness and sensuality and freed me from these obvious forms of sin. Since then, I have embarked on a daily, deeper cleansing of those things I wasn’t even aware of as sins in my youth. Far from ignoring sins, Christian Scientists wrestle with them daily, hourly, moment by moment—and conquer them through the love of Christ.

Laura MatthewsSanta Monica, Calif.

Helping Students Become All They Can BeThe editorial in the CT issue of April 26, “Why Christian Colleges Are Booming,” is very discerning, showing tremendous insight and understanding. A year ago the Coalition for Christian Colleges met in Indianapolis for a first-ever forum on Christian higher education. Those of us present were most sincere about “creating a distinctive academic environment that is academically challenging … as well as physically safe and morally sound” in the colleges we serve. Christian college presidents, administrators, and board members want to do what is necessary to help students become all they can be—with growth from a rigorous academic program where credentials earned have great value—with increased integrity as academic excellence blends with Christian commitment—with a valued work ethic to use in any arena into which God calls them.

The comment regarding faculty being the “most valued resource” in our Christian colleges/universities is almost understated! We cannot express enough appreciation to those who are called of God to share their academic disciplines and their lives, opening up the minds and hearts of their students to truth.

G. Roselyn Kerlin, ChairmanTaylor University Board of TrusteesDanville, Ind.

* As a person who has taught in both secular and sacred environments, I agree with your conclusion that Christian colleges provide academic environments that are physically safe, morally sound, and academically challenging. However, I frequently found myself “preaching to the choir” when working in Christian institutions and would rather be an educator in a secular place as there are more opportunities to convert others to a Christian world-view. I have, and always will, share my faith and integrate faith and learning in the classroom, even in public environments.

Prof. Alan R. LiskPenn State UniversityUniontown, Pa.

The ’99 Book Awards* I am a Ph.D. student with a personal library of over 6,000, primarily academic, volumes. Thus, I greatly value scholarly works. At the same time, I have worked in six Christian bookstores in three regions of the country. I believe my experience and training give me a good idea of what is stocked and actually sells in Christian bookstores. Of the 26 titles listed [April 26], a full two-thirds of them are not and will not be carried by Christian bookstores. Many are too highly priced. Many are too esoteric. All might be excellent books, but readers will be very few in number. Therefore, with two or three exceptions, this list is a failure if by it you had hoped to generate a wider audience for these books. When a book is not read, it has no impact on the church as a whole.

By no means should the sales or popularity of a book determine its real value to the church; but exactly what criteria are used when you declare this list to be “the best books published in 1998”? I fear this list may tell us as much about CT and those who voted as about the quality of the books listed.

I recommend a revamping of the book awards. Return to a type of format you used a few years ago, using several different categories. In that way, you may continue to recommend the scholarly works, but you will also be able to give due credit to excellent books on other topics which would never make your “professional” listing, such as those on marriage, family, and (dare I say it?) fiction.

Don StricklandGreer, S.C.

Church Growth in Frisco, Texas* Regarding the April 26 News article “Church Growth: Swindoll Starts Instant Megachurch” [North American Report], I was saddened to see that CT represents what is happening in Frisco, Texas, at Stonebriar Community Church as church “growth.” Are these multiplying numbers new converts or is this just the feeding frenzy of media-struck evangelicals? Has anyone checked with the emptying local churches who don’t have the advantage of a major media personality and his financial backing? Do they agree with Chuck Swindoll that “God is at work here or this would not have happened”? When will we get it that “big” doesn’t mean “blessing” from God? Indeed, it may be undermining what he is doing through “small.”

Don BuckinghamDublin, Ohio

If he missed preaching, why didn’t Chuck volunteer 25 or 30 weekends a year to go out to the places where some of his seminary graduates are struggling to build churches?

Douglas ConnellyFlint, Mich.

Is Chuck Swindoll’s “instant megachurch” an indication of the condition that American Christianity has fallen to at the end of the twentieth century? Nowhere in the article is there any indication of any evangelism taking place through the preaching of Dr. Swindoll at his new church, which there surely would be if he had indeed made 2,000 new converts. Now that would really be news!

Jon Eric PipesKeswick, Ont., Canada

* I hope I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that Stonebriar Community found 2,000 unchurched or pagan boomers and gen-Xers just waiting for someone to invite them to church.

William PileLos Angeles, Calif.

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 cannot 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.

Seeking to stem the tide of violence in public schools, the parents of three 1997 murder victims in Paducah, Kentucky, have filed a $100 million federal lawsuit claiming a variety of “defective” media products—computer games, Internet sites, and a motion picture—triggering the fatal assault by Michael Carneal.

Named as defendants are the makers of computer games Quake and Doom, as well as of Sega and Nintendo game systems and the producers and distributors of The Basketball Diaries, a 1995 Island Films release based on Jim Carroll’s 1978 novel. Both the novel—a recounting of the diary of a disaffected high-school student—and the film had scenes where the protagonist shoots a gun into a classroom of students, but the movie, which starred Leonardo Di Caprio, made the scene more graphic and violent.

In his trial, Carneal, who is serving a 25-year sentence without the possibility of parole for the murders of Jessica James, Kayce Steger, and Nicole Marie Hadley, relied on the testimony of Yale University medical professor Diane Schetky, an adolescent psychiatrist, who determined the killer had been “conditioned” by intensive exposure to violent games and movies.

The civil suit, filed by Coral Gables, Florida–based liability lawyer Jack B. Thompson and Bowling Green attorney Mike Breen, claims the products are “defective” because they taught Carneal how to kill effectively, without warning of their potentially deadly results.

“We have simply taken time-honored, adjudicated, reasonable-standard tort theory and applied it to these three categories of products,” Thompson told CT. “The most understandable would be those theories applied to video games,” which he calls “killing simulators” that teach advanced techniques on how to shoot.

Thompson notes that Carneal, at the time 14 years old, exhibited shooting be havior that belied traditional patterns for violent criminals. Where a shooter would normally fire several bullets at a victim and wait for them to fall before moving to the next target, Carneal, Thompson argues, used a far different learned behavior.

“Michael Carneal acted as if he were in a video game,” Thompson says. “He was simply moving his arm back and forth, picking off targets with one shot.”

Thompson says the rapid-fire technique is counterintuitive. “He must have learned it from a video game where you don’t waste bullets.”

DIRECT CONNECTION? The case drew renewed attention in the wake of the April 20 tragedy at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 persons and injured 23 before taking their own lives. Two victims, Cassie Bernall and Valeen Schnurr, were shot after answering affirmatively that they be lieved in God. Bernall died in the shooting while Schnurr survived.

In the wake of the Littleton tragedy, there have been manifest calls to urge Hollywood and video-game producers to set limits on what they depict and how they do it.

The notion that the same tactics used in training soldiers are at work in media and entertainment is not new (CT, Aug. 10, 1998, p. 31). And as the 2000 presidential election draws near, the theme likely will be repeated more often.

According to attorney Thompson, violent video games such as Quake and Doom are not “protected speech” under the Constitution.

“To suggest that a video game is First Amendment protected speech is incorrect,” Thompson says. Rather, he contends the video game is a consumer product, which can be recalled if defective and could be subject to product liability claims.

“A Chatty Cathy doll that has a part a kid could choke on can be recalled,” Thompson says. “The fact that it makes a sound doesn’t make the doll First Amendment [protected] speech.”

Video game producers have been notably silent on the question of whether their products induce or incite violence. John Carmack, whose Dallas-based company, ID Software, created Doom, says fan enthusiasm is what should determine the marketplace value of games.

“We make the games we like to play and throw them out into the world,” Carmack told the Los Angeles Times. “We don’t get involved in politics.”

INTERNET TARGETS: Attorneys Thompson and Breen have also named a Web site and film as defendants in the suit. The Internet p*rnography site Persian Kitty is run by self-described “family-oriented” homemaker Beth Mansfield of Tacoma, Washington. Carneal apparently visited the site, which, by its own admission, “contains images of adult-oriented and/or sexually explicit material,” even though such material should not be viewed by minors, according to Thompson.

“Some of what Carneal consumed [online] was obscene to minors, or indecent,” Thompson says. “He should not have had access to this.”

Thompson admits that his most difficult element to prove would be the claims against The Basketball Diaries, which he says “comes closer to the line of First Amendment–protected speech.”

However, Thompson notes that the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that a suit against Oliver Stone’s 1994 movie Natural Born Killers may proceed. The suit allows an “incitement clause” where a producer could be liable if a film incites violence, which Thompson claims happened in Paducah.

Copyright © 1999 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

David Sumrall, a third generation pastor at the Cathedral of Praise in Manila, says the Philippines is experiencing a historic spiritual revival. “It’s harvest time,” Sumrall says. “Each night we take our service to different parts of Manila, and hundreds are getting saved. Come back in a year’s time and you will see our new sanctuary with 8,000 seats full.”

But even as Christian leaders embrace optimism for the church’s future, they face a complex set of problems and challenges, from societal poverty to interchurch rivalry, all of which threaten to derail revival within one of Asia’s most important enclaves of Christianity.

In spite of the difficulties, 25-year missionary Ken Keihlbauch says, “The church is growing through the day-to-day faithfulness of countless local believers. Over the years I’ve seen a tremendous excitement in the evangelical church as people come to Christ.”

The Philippines, an archipelago of 7,000 islands, has 72 million people in a unique mixture of Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and North American cultures. During three hundred years of Spanish rule, not only was the population Christianized, but the economic system was Westernized, creating an elite class of wealthy landowners and an underclass of tenant farmers.

As Christian faith and practice developed in later generations, many churches became a potpourri of myth, folklore, and Roman Catholicism that prevails even today.

SALT AND LIGHT? The Christian gospel has more deeply penetrated the Philippines than any other Asian nation. Neighboring countries are mostly Buddhist, Communist, or Muslim.

Although the Roman Catholic church has been well established for centuries, the growth of the Catholic church is very close to the 2.3 percent annual growth rate of the overall population. But Protestant groups, especially evangelicals, have been growing at about twice the population rate. “We now have 32,000 churches in the Philippines, and 27,000 of these were planted in the last 25 years,” says Bishop Efraim Tendero of the Philippine Council for Evan gelical Churches. “Our target is to plant 50,000 churches by the end of December 2000.” There are about 1,400 American Protestant missions personnel based in the Philippines.

Yet few evangelicals are gloating over their rapid growth. Isabelo Magalit, president of the Asian Theological Seminary in the Philippines, says, “We have not taught our people to be salt and light in the marketplace where they spend most of their day. We need to penetrate all these places by accepting that the mission of the church is broader than simply to evangelize.”

Perhaps ministry to poor Filipinos presents one of the greatest challenges to expanding the evangelical church’s mission. The government says 32 percent of the population live below the poverty line, but some experts say it is really twice that number.

Land reform, which would put arable property into the hands of tenant farmers, has long been advocated by political progressives. Joseph Estrada, inaugurated as president a year ago, has pledged to distribute 618,000 acres of private agricultural land under the decades-old land-reform program. Church leaders believe the land-reform program is essential for reducing poverty in rural areas, where almost 70 percent of Filipinos live. But today, seven out of ten Filipino farmers remain landless. Habitat for Humanity, the Georgia-based housing ministry, has been active in the Filipino land-reform movement. Two months ago, some 8,000 Filipino Christians worked jointly to build 250 dwellings for Filipino poor people, many living in shantytowns, on land donated to Habitat.

CHARISMATIC COMMON GROUND: Service-minded ministries, such as Habitat for Humanity, have been a significant unifying influence among Christians. But greater potential for Christian unity is found within the charismatic movement, both Protestant and Catholic.

Since Vatican II reforms, some active Catholics in the Philippines have been drawn into the Catholic charismatic movement, creating a place of common ground between Protestants and Catholics. “There is a real born-again experience in the Catholic charismatic renewal,” observes Tendero. “I believe God is using that to bring openness in the country to the gospel.” Couples for Christ has become one of the largest Catholic renewal groups.

Other charismatics have joined one of the many independent church groups, such as the El Shaddai Movement, a Catholic charismatic sect led by Mike Velarde, who has no formal theological training. A television preacher who claims a following of 8 million people, Velarde has built a substantial media organization and has support from the middle class as well as the poor. Velarde, well known for his flashy dress, has been drawn into the government’s corridors of power and is a recognized spiritual adviser to President Estrada.

Verlarde’s church has several branches around the country, and members regularly gather for large meetings at the biggest facility in Manila. “With his simplistic hermeneutics he preaches somewhat of a prosperity gospel,” Magalit says. “But it is obvious that he reads his Bible a lot.”

LEADERSHIP SHORTCOMINGS: Other than intense Bible study, formal theological training is a work in progress for many churches, leading to a familiar self-criticism that pastors and lay leaders are ill equipped to do their jobs.

For Steve Mirpuri, pastor of the Living Body of Christ, the shortcomings among leaders has been a sobering realization. Mirpuri says, “We need to trust in the Lord more and to be more biblical in the model that we adopt for church structure and leadership. It has made us re-examine ourselves and hopefully protect ourselves.”

One of the fallouts of the leadership problem has been splits among the top megachurches in the Philippines: Word for the World, Bread of Life, and Jesus Is Lord each has experienced a congregational split.

Because many Filipino churches have grown strong in number and outreach without seminary-trained clergy, formal training is seen by many as unnecessary to church growth and development. Magalit says, “Seminaries are considered passe.”

Despite their shortcomings, most Christian leaders in the Philippines endorse the same goal: To fulfill God’s destiny for the nation. Rey Corpuz of the Philippine Missions Association says, “I want the Philippine church to be a beacon of light in this nation, a bastion of justice and peace, order and love. I want to see the Philippine church blessing other nations, including Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus.”

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Although nearly 3,000 foreign missions personnel are working in the Philippines, the Filipino church has grown to the point where it also sends missionaries overseas. And sometimes those workers, as tentmakers, face danger.

For instance, Galicano Afurong worked for a private company in Saudi Arabia, one of the strictest Muslim countries in the Middle East, but in his spare time he planted churches—until authorities learned about it. He was arrested last July for distributing Christian literature and deported after spending 28 days in jail. More than 30 Filipinos in Saudi Arabia have been arrested for sharing their faith, and several have reported intensive interrogations and abuse before being deported (CT, Aug. 10, 1998, p. 26).

In all, the Philippines Missions Association has 1,000 Filipinos working cross-culturally and aims to send another 2,000 by next year—1,000 overseas and 1,000 within the Philippines.

“Now it is time for us to get out of the crib,” says Bob Lopez of the Asian Center for Missions in Manila.

Even those arrested do not stop preaching. For instance, Filipino Rene Camahort became a Christian while in a Saudi Arabian jail. He was deported last month after spending three years and nine months in a Riyadh jail. Camahort had been arrested in 1995 when his employer, Al-Tayar Travel Agency, accused him of embezzlement. Camahort, who at six feet tall and 200 pounds is larger than most Filipinos, helped to physically protect his Christian inmates after converting.

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While Israel is pulling out all the stops in preparation for an inundation of pilgrims to mark the beginning of the third millennium of Christianity, a dispute in one of the cities where it all started is giving tourism officials headaches.

The city of Nazareth, Jesus’ boyhood home, is in the midst of a $100-million renovation that includes an archaeological re-creation of a first-century village and the construction of new hotels (CT, Feb. 8, 1999, p. 22).

But an area near the massive Church of the Annunciation, designated for construction of a tourist plaza, has been seized by local Muslims who claim it for a mosque. They want to commemorate the tomb of Shehab al-deen, who fought against Crusaders in the twelfth century. Tensions erupted into violent clashes last Christmas and again on Easter.

Islamic leaders have thus far refused to compromise and rebuffed an offer of another larger locale for a mosque, which was made by a committee that included deputy prime minister Moshe Katsav and foreign minister Ariel Sharon.

Nazareth’s Christian mayor, Ramez Jaraisi, and the Israeli government officials are in a difficult position. Muslims, not Christians, are now the majority population in Nazareth. But the Vatican has threatened to close churches and possibly even reconsider a visit by Pope John Paul II if a mosque is built in the shadow of Nazareth’s prime attraction.

With the largest flood of pilgrims in Holy Land history at stake, officials are working diligently for a solution. Katsav, who is also tourism minister, says “Israel has invested $500 million during the last few years in preparation for 2000.” But government officials realize the investment could be for naught if Muslim extremists cause large numbers of Christian tourists to stay away.

BETHLEHEM, JERICHO: The Israelis have competition. Jordan and the Palestinians, who now control Beth le hem and Jericho, are making their own plans for pilgrims and tourists.

As with Nazareth, Bethlehem is a mess for visitors this year as hotels and other facilities are being built. The parking lot in front of the Church of the Nativity has been torn up for construction of another pilgrims’ plaza.

In Jericho, bold new attractions could bring new notoriety to one of the world’s oldest cities. A casino opened last year and appears to be thriving despite condemnations from both Jewish and Muslim religious leaders.

A line of steel towers has been constructed for a cable car that will soon whisk visitors from the archaeological site marking the ruins of ancient Jericho up to the “Mount of [Jesus’] Temptation,” with a magnificent view of the southern Jordan River Valley.

Just across the river, a major excavation and restoration project is under way at a Byzantine-era complex of churches, monasteries, and waterworks originally built to commemorate the ministry of John the Baptist.

Wadi Kharrar, as it is called today, has become the focus of a $5 million Jordanian tourism effort to entice pilgrims into the Holy Land outside of Israel next year.

But a majority of people who come to Jericho go south instead of east, heading for Masada, the mountaintop fortress where 960 Jewish zealots took their own lives rather than submit to Romans in A.D. 73. “Just about every tourist who comes to Israel comes to Masada,” says Tali Gini, an archaeological inspector who oversees the site. Masada already has a cable car, but a new one accommodating twice as many passengers is being constructed.

COMINGS AND GOINGS: Access and egress are two of the biggest concerns for those in charge of readying sites for next year. New hotels can be built virtually anywhere. Holy sites located inside centuries-old buildings do not as easily lend themselves to change.

At the traditional site of the Last Supper, just outside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City, a new exit has been installed.

A separate exit for the Old City’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which marks the traditional spot of the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, is more of a challenge. Israeli government officials are in talks with the Orthodox, Catholic, and Coptic clerics who oversee all activities within the ancient facility.

The religious leaders showed uncharacteristic agreement on a rotunda gilding and remodeling that brightened up the inside of the church a couple of years ago after an American millionaire agreed to foot the bill. But any change that gives a perceived advantage to one Christian tradition over another inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is sure to prompt sharp disputes among Jerusalemite Christians.

SIX MILLION VISITORS: Roman Catholics are likely to make up the largest number of visitors next year at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as Pope John Paul II has proclaimed 2000 a “holy year” as well as a “world pilgrimage to the Holy Land year.”

Vatican officials have told the Israelis to expect 6 million pilgrims in 2000. For the past three years, an average of 2.4 million visitors traveled to Israel, including many evangelicals.

Rick Ricart of TTI Travel in Wheeling, Illinois, has mainly Protestant clientele. “We’re up 35 percent in bookings for the Holy Land,” he says about next year.

Whether the political climate will remain stable enough to draw visitors who have been weighing a visit for many years is still, to some degree, out of their hands. But if tourists come, Israel plans to be ready.

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In the cyber-savvy 1990s where the amount of available knowledge doubles every 100 days, Christian ministries and individuals are trying new evangelism techniques on the Internet to make an impact for Christ.

Peggie Bohanon, editor of the Internet for Christians Newsletter, shares her faith through a series of e-mails, postings, poems, and even homework help at her Muskegon, Michigan, site (www.peggiesplace.com).

Debbie Nelson of Schaumburg, Illinois, turned a graduate school project into a Web site (www.juliesplace.com) that helps bereaved kids. “I lost my sister when I was six, and I always thought there should be a way for kids to talk to other kids dealing with the same kind of tragedy,” Nelson explains. “As I developed the Web site it only seemed natural to include my own testimony about the way Jesus comforted me and gave me hope.”

David Bruce, pastor of a small evangelical church in Patterson, California, decided to use film reviews to get Web surfers thinking about biblical themes. His Hollywood Jesus site (www.hollywoodjesus.com) has been visited by almost 2 million viewers.

“We should use pop culture to attract the people ensnared in our culture,” Bruce says. “I love our culture the way a missionary loves the culture of the people he feels called to minister to.”

CHURCH WEBCASTS: Harvest Crusade, an evangelistic ministry in Riverside, California, broadcasts live events on the Web and video messages explaining how visitors can know God. Around 45 people a week accept Christ through the Harvest site. In fact, Harvest Christian Fellowship has 1,100 weekly online attenders who receive the entire church service on live simultaneous audio and video services on the Internet (www.harvest.org).

“The variety and scope of the Internet expands witnessing opportunities wonderfully,” says Sterling Huston, a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) board director. Huston believes the Internet offers Christians a unique witnessing opportunity because it allows people to ask questions with anonymity from their own homes. But this kind of personal access has a price.

“What the Christian community needs to be challenged by is the fact that the Internet not only is growing dramatically, but it’s changing dramatically and therefore demands a great deal of resources,” Huston says.

Large evangelical organizations, such as Campus Crusade for Christ in Orlando and Coral Ridge Ministries in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, are now spending up to $200,000 a year to maintain sites with multiple points of entry and keywords that are attractive to non-Christian Web surfers.

“When people surf the Web they are looking for the latest and greatest,” says John Carley, president of Trinet Internet Solutions, the company that oversees the Harvest Crusade site. “If you want to continue to draw people in, then you’ve got to keep up with the technology. Our goal is that the church would be the first to introduce new technologies, but that gets really expensive really fast.”

Some evangelicals are concerned that technological effects are not the best way to share the gospel, in addition to the problem of costliness of such efforts. “It’s fatal to attempt to out-entertain the world,” says Doug Groothuis, author of The Soul in Cyberspace (Baker Books, 1997). “The gospel isn’t about entertainment and it isn’t easy. It’s about genuine life change.” Groothuis, who is a philosophy professor at Denver Seminary, says people must experience the gospel lived out in flesh, not through text on a computer screen.

MEETING TODAY’S NEEDS: Other concerns raised about Internet evangelism revolve around the need for Christian community and the best ways to connect new converts to local churches. Harvest Crusade mails new believers a Bible and a growth packet, and the Minneapolis-based BGEA (www.theway.billygraham.org) sends a free subscription to Decision magazine.

“One of the primary needs of the Christian online community is for a network of responsible ministries worldwide who can supply discipleship after someone becomes a Christian,” Huston says.

Despite the large financial commitment required and concerns about local support community, many ministries are investing time and energy in a Web presence. “The relevant church—if it’s being relevant—must understand that in order to communicate with this generation, we have got to use this method of communication to get our point across,” Huston says.

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After ten days of deliberation and five rounds of balloting, the Salvation Army’s High Council in London elected Commissioner John Gowans as its sixteenth general on May 15.

Gowans, a 64-year-old native of Blantyre, Scotland, is known informally among evangelicals as the church’s “poet laureate,” having written hundreds of poems, many of which have been set to music. Some have become Salvation Army hymns. Gowans will succeed Gen. Paul A. Rader, the first American-born leader of the movement. Rader will retire next month on his sixth-fifth birthday to Lexington, Kentucky, where he will serve on the board of governors at Asbury College, his alma mater. The outgoing leader will have served almost five years as international head of the organization, and he, with his commissioner wife, Kay, has visited 72 of the 104 countries in which the movement operates.

Though primarily known for its social services, the Salvation Army is an evangelical denomination claiming a global membership of 1.2 million worldwide, including 786,000 in Africa and 117,000 in the United States.

Along with relief work in domestic disasters, such as the tornadoes that struck Oklahoma and Kansas last month, the organization is feeding refugees from the war in Kosovo, with plans calling for a six-month program of offering 27,000 meals per day, at a cost of $2.4 million.

Salvation Army ministers, called officers, and laypersons, known as soldiers, have been sent to refugee camps in Albania to support the effort.

ORIGINAL VISION RESTATED: Gowans’s election comes at a moment when the Salvation Army is under the strain of the increasingly complex demands of providing humanitarian assistance around the world while facing the internal challenge of retaining a spiritual emphasis for Salvationists.

New York University scholar Diane Winston, who has just published Red-Hot and Righteous (Harvard University Press), a book on the movement’s American metamorphosis from rabble-rousing religionists to respected social force, says the group aimed different messages at different audiences, reserving religion for the “lower classes” and aiming fundraising at the more affluent people who form the core of its financial supporters.

While disaster relief and social work are important, Gowans, in a postelection phone interview with CT, reports that he will put an emphasis on the spiritual side of the group’s work.

“The Salvation Army was created to achieve three chief aims: to save souls, to cultivate saints, and to serve suffering humanity,” Gowans says. “My intention is to remind Salvationists not to be diverted from those three main aims and not to allow any attractive side paths to divert them from those highways.”

Gowans acknowledges that while the Army is respected worldwide for its social work and fundraising acumen—the group raises more than $1 billion a year in the United States, ranking at or near the top this decade for charities—it has lost some of its distinctive edge in evangelism, ironically at a time when many people could use the brand of Wesleyan holiness the Salvation Army preaches.

“To some extent, we have lost the focus on our first purposes,” Gowans says. “One of my goals is to get the Army to refocus.” While the movement’s adult rehabilitation centers still have vital work in helping reform alcoholics and drug abusers, Gowans says the movement needs to look at other spiritual issues confronting seekers today.

“There are things like apathy, there are things like fatalism, that people need saving from,” he says. “[The Army is] an evangelical church with a message of the gospel to proclaim. I need to do something about that.” Gowans says he hopes to use video communications and the Internet to convey that message to Salvationists worldwide.

Two days after his election, Gowans selected his longtime friend and musical-composition partner, Commissioner John Larsson, 61, as second-in-command of the worldwide movement. Larsson was another of the five candidates nominated for general in the balloting. “I need someone with the gift of administration, since I don’t possess that gift,” Gowans says. Gowans will serve until November 2002, when he reaches age 68.

Gowans’s wife, Commissioner Gisele Gowans, will become international president of Women’s Organizations for the Salvation Army. Gisele Gowans, a native of France and ordained as a Salvation Army minister in 1955, most recently has been in charge of women’s ministries for the movement’s United Kingdom congregations.

RADER REFLECTIONS: Contemplating five years astride a movement in flux, Rader in an interview at the Salvation Army’s National Advisory Organizations Conference in Pasadena, California, acknowledged that he and his wife “moved quickly and kept a strong pace.”

“It’s been intense, but extremely satisfying.” He cites two moves under his administration as keynotes: one in which married women officers received the rank equal to that of their husbands, viewed as a major change; the other, less widely known, involved the strengthening of Salvation Army ties to evangelical groups including the Lausanne Consultation on World Evangelization, the AD 2000 Movement, and the World Evangelical Fellowship. He also spoke with satisfaction of the movement’s opening of a work in Vietnam, where the Salvation Army’s uniform will be displayed in public for the first time in nearly 25 years. “The Salvation Army has never been more needed than it is now,” Rader declares. “There’s still a lot of saving that needs to be done.”

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Why? Two of the major news weeklies emblazoned that three-letter word across their covers the week following the massacre at Columbine High. Seven weeks later, we have been overwhelmed by simplistic explanations and quick-fix remedies, many of them ignoring a dark reality: evil always manages to thwart the best human programs and philosophies.

This is not to say that “simple” can’t also be right and good. We heard some helpful ideas that can at least help us minimize the incidence of such evils.

Home alone. In the days following the tragedy, David Thomas, the district attorney investigating the case, seemed reluctant to discuss the circ*mstances surrounding the shootings or the current state of the investigation. Instead, he said, “We are not doing a very good job of communicating with our kids.” And communication requires time spent with our kids. As Harvard’s Deborah Prothow-Stith puts it: “Children figure out how to get adults’ attention, time, and resources. We decide how we are going to give it to them.”

The case of Cassie Bernall, one of the girls killed in the shootings and now celebrated as a martyr, points up the importance of not only parental attention, but of parental intervention. Because Cassie was fascinated with witchcraft and suicide, her parents insisted she attend church and change her circle of friends. In a culture of personal autonomy, parents often feel that they are transgressing when they enter a teenager’s room or insist on standards of behavior. But parents risk far more by engaging in denial or in hands-off loving. Over time, the Bernalls’ intervention worked, Cassie found Christ, and her life was turned around for the good.

Natural born killers? In our August 1998 issue, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman argued persuasively that the media are desensitizing youth to violence, conditioning them to associate violence with pleasure, and through simulator-type video games, even giving them the skills to kill with guns.

It was no surprise to Grossman that the two young killers in Colorado were fans of violent movies such as Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries, as well as skilled players at shoot-’em-up video games. Grossman had told CT he had also been predicting “for almost a year now that the next ‘big one’ would include bombs. Why? Because that is how you rack up a real ‘high score’ in the upper levels of the video games.”

Lethal weapons. In 1995 the leading cause of death for 15- to 24-year-olds was firearms. Every day about 13 children die from firearms in the United States. As three trauma-unit professionals noted in the Chicago Tribune, if a children’s toy causes 13 deaths a year, that product is pulled from the market. True, some angry or deranged person must pull the trigger. But, they ask, what would have been the outcome in Littleton if these boys had been armed with only fists or knives instead? Certainly not 15 dead.

The common view, still held by the firearms lobby, has maintained that gun-control laws won’t be effective because most criminals steal their weapons or otherwise get them illegally. According to violence expert Fox Butterfield, that view is being overturned by data collected in recent years by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Because ATF has been tracing guns used in crimes, we now know that most guns used in crimes come from legitimate dealers, and about half of guns acquired by young offenders were acquired either by friends or others who were old enough to buy on their behalf. Just such a “straw purchaser,” Dylan Klebold’s 18-year-old girlfriend, was involved in supplying three of the four guns used in the Columbine massacre.

Clamping down on “straw purchasers” and lax gun dealers is not enough, but some cities (including Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Los Angeles) have been helped by targeting the illegal sales of handguns and assault weapons in much the same way they have cracked down on drugs. Those cities have been rewarded with sharp drops in violent crime. Nevertheless, the deeper problem is a cultural obsession with firepower manufactured for reasons other than hunting or marksmanship. And laws can never cure an obsession.

Trading places. After two years of violence in suburban and rural schools, white, middle-class folk can no longer think that violence in America is someone else’s problem—poor minorities in inner-city neighborhoods. This violent culture is our problem. It is not just a matter of entertainment media, but of cultural myth: It is a small step from our celebration of the valiant individual to our fascination with violent outlaws. Whether on the open frontier (Jesse James) or the dense cityscape (Al Capone), we have romanticized thugs and their violent, independent ways. The bright side of independence is freedom; the shadow side is disorder. The bright side of economic liberty is abundance; the shadow side is thievery. We can market $100 athletic shoes to our youth, and those who can’t afford them can simply take them from others.

Our churches need to remythologize believers’ mental make-ups. Jesus, not Jesse James, needs to be our hero. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Martin de Porres, not Martin Scorsese, should be forming our imaginations.

Filling the God-shaped holeNewsweek supported its oversized Why? cover line with the subhead “the science of teen violence.” But fighting teen violence takes more than understanding (and possibly treating) bad brain chemistry. Violence is a disease of the soul as much as it is of the brain.

Much has been made of Klebold and Harris’s fascination with the nihilism of shock rocker Marilyn Manson, “Goth” culture, and Hitler. This fascination no doubt revealed something deeper. These boys were looking for something: perhaps for God, for meaning, or perhaps for something to drown out a still, small voice.

As Luther once said, Man hat Gott oder abgott, that is, we either have God in our lives or we have false gods.

When one of the killers encountered Cassie Bernall in the library where much of the killing took place, he asked her if she believed in God. Avoiding the easy way out, she reportedly replied: “There is a God, and you need to follow along God’s path.” Then the youth replied, “There is no God,” and he shot Cassie in the head, making her pay the ultimate price for her faith.

We should avoid funeral pieties about God bringing tragedies like this for the greater good. Nevertheless, because of the Cross, Christians look for signs of God at work in the aftermath of tragedies. God can and does bring good out of the most horrendous evil.

Many of the kids who were killed were churchgoers, and Denver television repeatedly broadcast images of kids praying and singing together. “For the first time in a long time,” one Denver Christian said, “it’s not politically in correct to talk about God and religion. Too bad it took something like this to see it.”

At the funeral of Rachel Joy Scott, time was allowed for people to share reflections about her life. One heavyset youth, with bleached hair and tattoos on his neck, said, “All my life I prayed that someone would love me and make me feel wanted. God sent me an angel,” he said, nodding toward Scott’s coffin as he broke into tears. Would that those two other young men from Columbine High had seen and felt God’s unconditional love filling the voids in their lives. Who knows what could have happened or what awful deeds might have been averted.

TransformersFollowing the Littleton tragedy, Martin Marty pointed to the fact that “the faiths” do well “at reteaching a culture that there are dense black holes of evil.” Then he threw down the challenge: “Does the religious world also have a language to do more than notice such evil?”

The case of Cassie Bernall points up the importance of parental intervention.

Yes, and more than language. In the particularity of Christian faith (not just generic “faiths”), we know firsthand the transforming power of the gospel. Thus we take with utmost seriousness the roles we have as Christian parents, leaders, church members, and Sunday-school teachers to point young people to the reality of God in this world, of his claims on their lives, and that fulfillment comes only through living for him. We also take seriously the need to give American teens something to live for other than consuming. Unless they experience the joy of helping others, they will assume that life is about helping themselves. Fortunately, short-term missions trips are becoming a standard part of church youth programs. And urban service outings and fasting to fight hunger are becoming common, transforming experiences as well. Give our youth anything less, and we fail in our responsibility.

Youth violence is a complex, multifaceted problem. To reduce it, many cultural phenomena must be addressed, including the atomized family, the entertainment culture, and guns. Yet, we also need to speak to the God-shaped hole in each of us, our craving and need for God at the center of our lives as humans. If we don’t, we are offering the spiritually hungry only half a loaf. Or maybe even only crumbs.

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