I’m posting this critique having seen this book described as a successor to my history of IFES Day of His Power; and I want to make clear that instead they represent, in my view, radically different visions of IFES’ calling from God. As I’ve written to Timothee (see below), his book really seems to me to be undermining the classic IFES vision and values that have made IFES so fruitful, and that Day of His Power was written deliberately to foster. It also, again as I’ve raised with him, seems to me to be undermining IFES’ staff and students’ commitment to its biblical doctoral basis that has been so vital, with something more theologically liberal taking its place. (In effect, it might seem, to reinvent IFES as the liberal WSCF.) If I am right (and I hope I’m not, but I’m deeply troubled), such a departure from the classic values and foundational beliefs of IFES can only be potentially really very damaging. (And particularly for any inexperienced leaders reading it, and for the movements they serve.)
I feel the fairest way to document this is to attach below my letter to Timothee. This is in some depth and was not a review as such, so anyone reading what follows may well wish to jump straight to the sections numbered 17 onwards.
I must add, however, that after I had written to Timothee I noticed the extremely troubling footnote on p.208 where, having questioned if it was `missiologically responsible` to keep the IFES statement of faith without change because `other “essentials” could emerge in other contexts`, he then suggests that `A very tentative list [of such “essentials”] might include the doctrine of reconciliation, the Christus Victor approach to the atonement, the doctrine of imago Dei, the doctrine of the kingdom of God, issues relating to mission, political theology and social justice, gender equality, etc.` I myself believe in contrast that a movement that had these as its central “essentials” (eg on the atonement), and as its priorities, rather than the current statement of faith and values, would be quite different from IFES as we know it and as God has used it; and it troubles me deeply to read a proposal for such a major `reinvention`; hence this post.
I should also say that Timothee responded very briefly but very courteously and politely to my letter.
Here then is my letter, unamended.
—
Timothee, hello. Greetings from England!
I’ve been reading your book; a strikingly wideranging piece of work! It’s a great pity we’ve never met, as having written the IFES history The Day of His Power I think I could have been of help to you as you wrote it. But anyway I thought I would send you some interactions in the hope that they can be helpful in your future ministry in IFES.
First however let me introduce myself: besides compiling The Day of His Power I edited the IFES magazine IN TOUCH for 12 years reporting on the developments of our movements worldwide, then looked after our pioneering of the Baltics, Belarus and Russia west of the Urals for the next 11. Altogether I’ve had the opportunity to see and minister in 30 IFES movements, travelling widely within the local groups of all but about six of these. (However I was never on the executive committee (as you say on pp. 211 and 214).)
So let me make a few interactions.
First then some very minor corrections:
1. p.33 The quote from Stacey is his own words.
2. p.48 Aw Swee Eng was not `young` – I met his daughter as a student member of the Singapore group that year!
3. p.50: I think you’re mistaken about the influence of J N Darby’s view of the `apostasy of the church`, in which the new testament vision was irretrievable. On the European continent eg Switzerland Darby’s followers might still be involved in IFES (I’ve found that to be so in Germany), but there was a major split between them and Darby’s UK followers (the `Exclusives`), and any of the latter would have been extremely unlikely to have had any involvement whatsoever with UCCF or IFES. As for the Open Brethren (who followed Muller as against Darby in the original Brethren split), in the anglosaxon countries it is these who as you say provided a considerable number of IFES leaders, but in contrast to Darbyism they would have had a very positive vision of the Church still being present as, primarily, the all-important, glorious, eternal, supernatural Bride of Christ; I have never encountered Darby’s `church in ruins` view among Open Brethren. (I was surprised by the way (but take your word for it) to see you saying that Douglas Johnson was influenced by Darby, because he was very much an evangelical Anglican.)
4. p.61 I would argue that `the sixties` as a cultural phenomenon didn’t get going till a couple of years after 1963.
5. p.121 These papers were published in IFES REVIEW, not IN TOUCH.
A bit more significant:
6. p.120: About what you say regarding the succession process to Wee Hian being western-dominated, resulting in a westerner being appointed: I was not privy to the executive discussions, however we were a very small senior staff team and I would have put money on Wee Hian’s successor being Isabelo Magalit the greatly respected GS of the Philippines. And when it became obvious that Bel was not interested, the two obvious contenders seemed to be Lindsay Brown and Egyptian Ramez Atallah. (Ramez in fact thought his appointment to be sufficiently likely that he specifically asked me to stay on if he took the role.) However Ramez decided instead to become general secretary of the Egyptian Bible Society where he has done a magnificent job, leaving Lindsay as the most obvious contender.
7. p.124: I do think you’re mistaken about the differing views of graduate ministry argued by Moise Napon and Robin Wells being due to their `vastly different contextual realities`. I realise your paragraph is ambiguous about this, given its comment about graduate strategy in the 1940s UCCF. But issues here were much more complex than mere church and cultural contexts. Firstly, the 1980s was the time of the rise of management thinking (eg In Search of Excellence, Theory Z, One Minute Manager), which had a major influence on parachurch organisations in the Anglo-Saxon world. Robin brought this strongly into UCCF, for example developing a one-line organizational mission statement for the first time and cutting out what didn’t fit it. This (as I recall off the top of my head) was the period when UCCF dropped its ministry to international students which of course in the long run became Friends International. But up until then UCCF had had a strong commitment to graduate ministry and a very impressive range of specialist groups for graduates (agriculturalists, businessmen, social workers, university staff, and various others). The second factor, which I don’t totally understand, is somehow Robin’s approach on this (he was South African) was connected with him being strongly reformed theologically (more in the sense of Sydney-Anglican-reformed, not what you have on the continent nor the Lloyd Jones type of independent reformed). This influence was fairly new to UK evangelicalism in the 1980s and has continued to be very significant, and part of it tends to be avoiding doing anything that could be said to be the role of a local church. I personally think it’s unfortunate and don’t entirely understand how it comes to be rooted in a particular theology, but it (and therefore Robin’s view of graduate ministry) is certainly not cultural.
8. p.94 footnote 16:You talk here about Rene Padilla and Samuel Escobar being accused of marxism. It would have been good to make clear here that Rene’s 1979 liberation theology article you mention, and indeed Samuel’s on Marxism in 1981, were both published (ie endorsed!) in the official magazine of IFES (which I edited) (people would not know that that is what IN TOUCH was).
9. p.227 I really regret your comment that `Padilla’s talk at Lausanne seems to have precipitated his departure from the senior IFES team, pressured by the US and UK GSs.` I think this is most improbable. Lausanne happened in 1974, and in IN TOUCH Rene is described as running the IFES press Ediciones Certeza, the IVP-equivalent for the entire continent, a full seven years later. Further, anyone objecting to Rene’s Lausanne talk would presumably have objected to Samuel’s, and IN TOUCH lists him as an Associate General Secretary still in 1984. Then, I also can’t imagine US general director Jim McLeish being remotely interested in Lausanne, for personality reasons. (It’s true that he didn’t approve at all of our Latin American work, I remember him demanding that I explain what he called `the Latin American fiasco`, but this was not about theology but about what he perceived as a failure in evangelism, since Jim clearly believed that IVCF-USA could do a better job pioneering South America than we were doing.) And his successor Gordon McDonald was a much more eirenic character and I cannot see him making a fuss about Rene’s Lausanne talk either. Nor did either of them have a huge amount of influence in IFES.
10. p.229 I’m very puzzled by your comment that David Zac Niringiye `writes from a Majority World perspective where evangelical churches are often accustomed to being the minority`, and his writing reflects `a more fragile environment than the privileged context out of which earlier IFES writings arose` (pp.229, 232). Timothee, Zac is a Ugandan! Surely there would be far more people attending evangelical churches in Uganda than in the countries from which IFES arose from World War II onwards! And in much of Anglophone Africa 10% of the student population were in our groups, something none of the founding members of IFES (apart from Norway) could remotely have matched!
11. p.346 `IFES circles have not yet put significant energy into dialogue with scientific developments.` But IFES chairman Oliver Barclay was key in the formation of the Research Scientists Christian Fellowship, or Christians in Science as it’s now called. Are you aware of their significant regular publication Science and Christian Belief? And the IVPs have not been hesitant to publish (sometimes controversially) in this area.
12. p.132: IFES’ `expansion towards eastern Europe` was not a feature of the 1990s as you say here. Rather this took off as soon as the soviet empire began to collapse in 1985. In 1985 IN TOUCH featured East Germany; in 1987, Polish student camps though without naming the country; the Hungarian and Polish movements were featured on the front page in 1989, and the Yugoslavian and Romanian ones in 1991. We began pioneering Russia in 1989/90 and Belarus, Latvia and Lithuania in 1990/91, and the Estonian movement was founded in 1991.
13. I want to say too that your comment isn’t really accurate that in these countries there was `the tension to situate an evangelical parachurch organization in a mostly homogenous ecclesial landscape` (p.135). It is true that, as I’ll say in a moment, it was very important for us to understand how Orthodox doctrine compared to the DB, so as to understand the issues that might arise (and did) if significant numbers of Orthodox came to be student leaders. But in terms of the `ecclesial landscape`, Poland and Lithuania were Catholic countries presenting the same issues as we were used to in say Spain; and in Estonia and Latvia the key churches were Baptist and Lutheran. And as for Russia and Belarus (and I think Ukraine), there was never any likelihood of partnership with the Orthodox church, for various reasons. (That may have been different in Moldova and Romania because of the Lord’s Army, I don’t know.) So the challenge in Russia and Belarus, and I think Ukraine, was (rather than what you say) how as an interdenominational movement to `situate`, relate to the evangelical denominations, the pentecostals, baptists and charismatics, who didn’t like each other at all.
14. I’d like to encourage you to give a bit more thought to Latin America, because I think the Latin American situation was a lot more complex than you indicate. What is interesting is that in the ‘80s and earlier there was massive church growth in both English-speaking Africa and Latin America; but whereas that was reflected in the massive growth of the African student movements (several of which had 10% of the student population involved), in Latin America it was different. As far as I recall, in most countries except Brazil and periodically Mexico we had less than 150 students in the whole country; despite the massive church growth. I think there is a question at least worth considering as to whether, despite the really remarkable top leadership we had at the continental level, perhaps the way that integral mission was sometimes handled kept our groups small (and left them uncongenial for pentecostal students in particular); and if so, that has big implications for the engaging-the-university strategy now. (I remember someone on staff with the Peruvian movement saying that the Alianca church in Lima had as many students as our entire national movement, and if they so chose had more muscle for integral mission than we had.) A major change (as far as I could see) came when the Colombian movement affiliated to us; they had different roots, having been pioneered by Minamundo (Latin America Mission), and (again as far as I could see) a rather clearer evangelistic drive than some of our movements, even though they would surely never have denied our commitment to social action. And it was Colombians who pioneered Panama and Uruguay (and also gave staff to Ecuador and Portugal), as you can see from front pages of IN TOUCH.
I think also you need to recognize the extent to which the priority of integral mission was a response to the student situation. In his 1985 interview in IN TOUCH Samuel Escobar said `I think the pastoral problems facing students today are even more urgent than the problem that Marxism represented in my own days… It is the pastoral aspect, and the need for doctrinal clarity, that are more than ever necessary for our groups.` (No either/or shift away from doctrinal clarity to the socioeconomic there, despite what Terry Halliday says!) Similarly Jorge Atiencia’s back page interview in 1983 describes how the movements had to adapt to the fact that marxism was now far less interesting to students than the occult.
Finally three more fundamental things…
15. I think you haven’t got the pentecostal/charismatic situation right, and, therefore that it does not bear out your argument about the insufficiency of the doctrinal basis. In chapter 8 you present this as primarily a challenge of the 1990s. You do say that `charismatic gifts had been exercised in local groups for some time already`, but that understates it, in fact the charismatic had been a feature of much of IFES for a long time. To take some examples: in my own student time in the ‘70s many of our CU members were charismatic (and we had to sort out the place of tongues in our activities); in 1979 the biggest-ever Scandinavian student conference happened and a key factor in that, as I understood, was a Norwegian charismatic leader on staff with a big fan base(!). (And Ulf Ekman who became the key leader in the prosperity charismatic movement in eastern Europe was on staff in the Swedish movement, and as I understood SESG (Credo as it is now) had at that time a strong charismatic element.) In 1982 I spent some weeks in a preaching tour of the Nigerian groups and the charismatic movement was dominant throughout the country (actually in fairly extreme forms; the Assemblies of God was very much the moderate variety – an example of how student leadership will reflect the dominant flavours in a country’s evangelical churches), and indeed in Nigeria this issue went right back to 1972 (see Day of His Power p.250). When I spent time with the Malaysian and Singaporean movements in 1984 there were plenty of Assemblies of God students involved. And when a year earlier (1983) I wrote The Day of His Power, I made clear that the growth in Kenya was directly connected with the charismatic movement. I was also careful to make the point that UCCF was `neither pro- nor anti-charismatic` (DOHP p.98); again, this is 1983. And when we began work in the former USSR in 1990, links with pentecostal or charismatic students and church leaders became standard, for example in Vilnius, Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg and Minsk. (Indeed I myself was attending an excellent pentecostal church!)
So the executive discussion you mention in 1994 was not the result of any new encounter with pentecostalism. Rather, there was a perennial pastoral problem, needing regular consideration, that some pentecostal students – often some of our most active evangelists – might demand that tongues and the teaching of a second blessing were indispensable. But I suspect also that Sam Olofin’s concern that charismatic students should feel welcome (your p.138) also reflected the fact that in the previous few years there had appeared within the IFES family (for the first time in my experience) a stridently anti-charismatic element, particularly from Australia. (Where the movement split over this.)
So this does not justify your argument that `the DB is historically as well as culturally conditioned` (p.140), and I’m really sorry to see you arguing that. Rather, the DB as it stood was understood (a quote I don’t seem to have used in DOHP, alas) as `a maximum as well as a minimum`; which meant that there would always be challenges requiring pastoral attention where people wanted to make their own denominational emphases equally basic. (Which, incidentally, I have experienced with calvinism every bit as much as with the charismatic; it is not an issue arising only with pentecostalism. I know it has also arisen in at least one IFES movement over believer’s baptism.) It is not a hermeneutical issue of how to interpret the DB (your p.203), but rather a pastoral one, inevitably recurrent in an interdenominational movement.
16. Similarly, I think in your desire to question the permanent value of the DB (p.134, and p.208: ``The question remains as to whether it is missiologically responsible to keep without change such a statement of faith for national movements created potentially more than 70 years after the inception of IFES, in contexts immeasurably different`), you get wrong what was happening in our encounter with Eastern Orthodoxy (pp.132ff). I was involved in those discussions, and I don’t think in any sense we felt that the DB needed, as you say, `constant reinterpretation`; rather, what Jonathan Lamb was trying to do was to understand the extent to which Orthodox doctrine was or was not compatible with our DB as it stood. Which was also the point of the assessment of Catholic doctrine in the `Call to Renewed Evangelical Awareness` issued after the General Committee of 1979.
17. Now I do realise that (p.13) your account of history is consciously selective and focused on what you feel gives `historical foundations` for ministry. However it is being presented and marketed as a history (see back cover and recommendation in the front). So I must say that I was concerned by the (I felt) unduly negative way you speak of IFES’ roots in its first 15 years or so (`embattled` p.67, `disillusioned` p.68, `traditional` p.85, `irony` in what IFES was doing p.177), and would encourage you to present things rather differently in your ministry to movements in future! Your original archival research in the WSCF files is very impressive, but I felt that as a result IFES’ history is presented one-sidedly, through and with a focus on WSCF’s detailed criticisms. These (instead of making the reader proud of IFES, which is surely part of your ministry if you are to be one of the departmental directors!) I felt made the historical IFES look a movement dominated by defensiveness and fear, a self-protective and doctrinally paranoid organization (`on campus more to preserve and defend theology than to engage the world`, p.231, which I really don’t think is true); whereas in fact those first years were years of vision, of a positive spirit, years of adventurousness and great advance to be proud of, with the pioneering of most of Anglophone Africa, Singapore, India, Japan, Philippines etc etc. Remember that the number of member movements doubled by 1959 and again by 1971! And here’s why that matters: my own vision and desire with Day of His Power was to make people proud of the IFES and its fundamental vision and beliefs, and mobilize them to live for these, and I think that is the task of an IFES staff; but I really don’t think this book does that?? (Likewise with your extensive use of Warner’s criticisms in ch11.)
(18. And I would have liked you to have asked, if WSCF was on the right track – and its agenda as you present it, as distinct from IFES’ at that time, can seem very similar to what the Engaging the University booklet is lobbying for – why has it shrunk into powerless insignificance?? – for the sake of your readers; so that the promotion of a not entirely dissimilar emphasis doesn’t result in IFES doing the same! )
19. But I have to say that my biggest concern (please forgive me, I want to be wrong) is a sense that you can be out of step with the doctrinal mindset that has kept IFES robust and biblical, and that therefore your book undermines commitment to the IFES doctrinal basis (eg `replication of Western forms`, p.111; `a question of power`, p.198; `compliant` p.210; `reactionary` p.210; the `moratorium on doctrine` idea; and especially pp.208-09 where you say `The question remains as to whether it is missiologically responsible to keep without change such a statement of faith for national movements created potentially more than 70 years after the inception of IFES, in contexts immeasurably different…` To me this argument from context against the DB doesn’t hold at all; matters such as the deity of Christ, the trustworthiness and authority of the Bible, Christ’s death for our sins, the bodily resurrection, salvation by faith etc, are either true or false, and either central to the biblical gospel or not; context is irrelevant to them. What context may mean, as you rightly imply, is that the need may arise to add position statements on issues that were previously unrecognized or unimportant, and this is not a new idea – eg the Africans did it about racism a long time ago. What your comments about context do not do is justify considering dropping any of these beliefs that are crucial to the gospel. I’m afraid you may accidentally give support to any student or staff who is questioning the DB’s importance as they drift away from biblical faith into liberalism; and I have to confess that concerns me if it reflects the future ministry of an IFES director? These realities, lived out, are the essential `spine` that connects IFES to the energies of God and keeps it from losing its way like WSCF did. Quoting Samuel Escobar, `What we see in our own history and in the history of the Church is that these basic tenets of evangelical truth and life have been liberating truths, dynamic elements within movements of renewal that God has used to keep His Church alive… This is how we in IFES understand them` (your p.113)! What I wish your book embodied, and I mean enthusiastically, is what you also quote Samuel Escobar calling `a strong tradition [in IFES] of passionate concern for evangelical truth` (p.158, also p.96).
It would be good to meet sometime. I must be honest with you that, having had the opportunity to watch what makes IFES movements effective in some 30 countries, I am extremely uneasy about the Engaging the University project as it has developed just up to this point, aiming to focus IFES students on the interests of the intellectual minority in the university, meanwhile risking losing the support of pastors and students who are passionate for evangelism and what Terry Halliday calls `pietism`; and risking causing IFES movements to shrink (as the WSCF ones have done) into (as a non IFES leader I spoke to not long back said about the IFES movement in her Asian country, which used to be large and indeed over the years had had significant social impact) little, unimpressive groups spending their time discussing academic issues. This is not the place to go into detail about that. But as its director I really hope that you will steer the Engaging the University project away from the (to my mind very unfortunate) first chapter of the ETU book that is on the website (I must say to my regret), with its patronising of the values of the evangelism, Godward spirituality and apologetics that have been central to our effectiveness, and are our absolute lifeblood and empowering for anything else at all! I want to encourage you to ensure that what’s done on the dialogic model is very definitely complementing or arising from and feeding back into evangelism and discipleship, rather than as Terry Halliday seems to think superseding them as somehow immature.
May God bless, keep, and guide you, and all of your family! Your brother
Pete Lowman
