Preachers of an Active Gospel

As evangelicals move away from their recent patterns of spiritual isolationism and back toward involvement in society, leaders who have been advocating this change have become more prominent. Billy Graham, certainly the world's best-known evangelical, has himself been urging a renewed social thrust, but there are even stronger voices. Among the most influential:

Oswald C. J. Hoffmann, 55, chairman of the Congress, is a jowly, Laughtonesque spellbinder who attracts some 30 million listeners to his weekly Lutheran Hour radio sermons. A onetime Lutheran pastor and college teacher, Hoffmann was a public relations director for the Missouri Synod Lutherans when he joined the show in 1955. Though Hoffmann can roll out a soul-jarring sermon as if he had been stumping the hill country all his life, he insists that evangelism is not only "proclamation" but social action as well.

Leighton Ford, 38, is the handsome, Canadian-born heir apparent to the Billy Graham empire. He met Graham 20 years ago, and Billy's younger sister Jean shortly thereafter at Wheaton College; they married while Ford was studying to become a Southern Presbyterian minister. Now an associate evangelist with Billy's Crusade, Ford is a shade more polished than Graham, and preaches even more earnestly than his brother-in-law that "a commitment to Christ is a commitment to social reform."

Keith Miller, 42, an Episcopal layman, recently won evangelical attention with two religious bestsellers, A Taste of New Wine and A Second Touch. A highly successful Oklahoma oilman, Miller has left business twice, first to earn a divinity degree at the Quakers' Earlham College, more recently to work on a doctorate in psychological counseling. Though theologically orthodox, Miller advocates interpersonal Christianity, in which, as he sees it, small, informal groups work best to infuse society with a spirit of honesty and love.

Tom Skinner, 27, once had 22 notches on his knife handle for all of the "cuts" he had inflicted on enemies by the time he was a 14-year-old gang leader of the Harlem Lords. Now an ordained minister of the National Baptist Convention, the 215-lb., gravel-voiced preacher traces his vocation to an intense conversion experience--when he accidentally heard a radio gospel broadcast while planning a gang rumble. Skinner thinks evangelical churches must lead the fight for social justice because it "takes regeneration from Jesus Christ to change society."

Myron S. Augsburger, 40, wears the "plain coat" of the Mennonite brotherhood as president of Eastern Mennonite College and Seminary in Virginia. But Augsburger is anything but oldfashioned. He is both a dedicated integrationist and a pacifist who forthrightly insists, "I don't think a just war is possible in this century." A wide-traveling and well-known evangelist, Augsburger is also an intense intellectual who believes that "evangelicalism is both creative and contemporary. It is not tied to any given culture, economic structure or political philosophy."

Mark O. Hatfield, 47, U.S. Senator from Oregon, is one of evangelicalism's most outspoken activists. Republican Hatfield was dean of students at Willamette University when he decided to make his Baptist faith more pertinent to his life. Now he spends much of his free time writing and speaking on the importance of belief. Hatfield denies that evangelicalism can be isolated from social commitment. "You can't see merely the soul of man. There is also the hunger of man, the sickness of man, the indecent, obscene poverty of man."

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