A '68 Seminar Participant Recalls

Tom Jones sent me the following excerpt from a book, In Search of a City: An Autobiographical Perspective on a Remarkable but Controversial Movement, he is preparing to publish later this year. It is good to begin hearing from those who were student-participants. My apology that for some technical reason I cannot format the following in paragraphs as it was written.

The following is copyrighted by Tom and may not be reproduced electronically or in any other form without his express written consent.

Excerpt from Chapter One: Lewis, Bonhoeffer and Dallas, Texas In the fall of 1968 I was chosen the president of the Christian Student Fellowship at Florence State Univerisity, now University of North Alabama, and as such, I received an impressive brochure in the mail describing an event billed as the International Campus Evangelism Seminar to be held at the Hilton Inn in Dallas in December of that year. I can still remember how I read that cutting-edge brochure (sharp even by today’s standards) with wide-eyed expectation. I can still see in my mind the picture of the Hilton Inn and remember the excitement that was generated as I thought about 1,000 Christians from many states in one hotel for four days. The only church events with that kind of attendance that I had heard of were on the campuses of Christian colleges. For Christians to be in a hotel signaled the beginning of something new, but none of us, of course, could have realized that we were witnessing what would seem later to me to be the birth of a movement. (By the way, I recently found that brochure and showed my family that the cost of the hotel was $5 per night, per person, with four to a room, and this was in a Hilton!) This event was being sponsored by Campus Evangelism (CE), a program of the Broadway Church of Christ in Lubbock, Texas. The leaders of CE were Jim Bevis (a native of my own part of Alabama), Charles Shelton and Rex Vermillion. Their ministry at Texas Tech in Lubbock was called Campus Advance. The brochure mentioned that this was actually the second international CE seminar, the first having been held in 1966. As a member of the Church of Christ and one convinced of the failings of denominational teaching on salvation, I was rather amazed to see that Bill Bright of Campus Crusade for Christ had been a speaker at that first seminar. Churches of Christ were known for having no contact with speakers outside their own fellowship unless the format was a well-advertised debate. I would later learn the leaders of CE had brought Bright in to give those in the Churches of Christ a vision of what could be done, and that they had adapted Campus Crusade's “Four Spiritual Laws,” producing their own attractive evangelistic booklet titled “Guideposts to Life on a New Plane.” The new booklet described the importance of baptism into Christ, something that was missing in the Campus Crusade material. They quoted Romans 6:4 from the J.B. Phillips translation and took the booklet’s title from that same passage:

We were dead and buried with him in baptism, so that just as he was raised from the dead by that splendid Revelation of the Father's power so we too might rise to life on a new plane altogether.

I am still not sure how it all happened, but in that bastion of theological conservatism in the church culture we were in, I somehow received permission to organize a group to attend the Dallas event. In retrospect, I imagine that this CE movement, full of suspect innovations, just had not hit the radar screens of the conservative church leaders in the Southeast. That would soon change. Right after Christmas 1968 a group of thirty of us (including my wife to be, whom I would propose to two months later) boarded a bus and traveled to Dallas, Texas. The theme of the event was “Say So!” based on Psalm 107:2 in the KJV.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy.

As anticipated, there were about 1,000 people in attendance, primarily college students from across the Bible Belt, Florida and California. The song leader for the seminar was someone named Chuck Lucas. He was introduced by the seminar leaders as the director of a CE "pilot project" in campus ministry at the University of Florida. He would be supported by CE but would be leading a Campus Advance effort in connection with the Fourteenth Street Church of Christ in Gainesville. He had with him a student leader that Sheila and I met; his name was J.P. Tynes. Twenty years later we would be in a group led by J.P. in the Boston Church of Christ. I would learn just recently from my friend Sam Laing that he was also in Dallas for this event and that the ministry in Gainesville had been started two years before the seminar. The seminar put great emphasis on sharing the gospel with others. At the time most campus ministries in the Churches of Christ were focused primarily on holding on to what were called preference students” (i.e. those who said they preferred the Church of Christ when they registered for classes at their college or university). The goal of campus ministry was often to try and keep students from losing their faith, since they were not attending Christian colleges. On those campuses where the church had established a “chair of Bible,” credit courses in the Biblical studies were taught as sort of “satellite” classes connected with a Christian college, but on most campuses there was little emphasis on evangelism. CE hoped to change that. They had printed up thousands of the little booklets I mentioned earlier: “Guideposts to Life on a New Plane.” We were encouraged to begin to use this tool in cold-contact evangelism even while we were at the hotel. At some point during the seminar I met a young woman from Nebraska who had come to the event with some friends but had little knowledge of the Bible. Using the new tool and adding to it other scriptures I knew, I shared with her what I understood about how to become a Christian. I can still remember getting up very early on Saturday morning to drive across Dallas where a minister opened his church building so she could be baptized into Christ. For several years after the seminar I corresponded with her, before eventually losing contact. If the seminar was organized to put neglected emphasis on evangelism, it also seemed to be designed to critique much that was wrong in the Churches of Christ. Seminar speakers emphasized the importance of grace, the sin of racial discrimination (a huge issue in 1968), the power of the Holy Spirit, the real meaning of fellowship, and the need for worship that was transforming not just routine. It would be prophetic preaching on these subjects that would shortly raise the ire of other church leaders. For me, the event was life changing. I would never think about much of anything in the same way again. For several years I replayed the tapes from the event over and over on my big Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thirty-nine years later, I can still remember most of the speakers including Wesley Regan, Jim Reynolds, John Allen Chalk, Roy Osborne and Andrew Hairston, as well as key lines from all of their messages. The Jesus I had become convinced of while reading the Scriptures and the writings of C.S. Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was now more alive than ever for me. Over the next four decades I would see and experience some great moments and some low ones, but it would be this Jesus and his grace that would keep me on the road.

Comments

[Wes Woodell]

And here's where you can buy that book, "In Search of a City": http://www.dpibooks.org/Default.aspx?tabid=59&ProductID=455&txtSearch=search&page=0

[Wes Woodell]

I'll look forward to reading this. Thank you to Tom for your work.

:)