In 1988, I was on the planning committee for the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association. The convention was being held in Indianapolis, and various Christian magazine editors from Indiana comprised the planning committee. Thus my involvement. We spent a year fleshing out much of what we wanted to do. Then the association’s leaders asked us to turn it into a joint convention with the Associated Church Press, and it was back to Square One.
The EPA is the conservative group, the ACP the liberal group. The ACP includes publications from mainline churches, and even some Jewish and other non-Protestant publications. But we agreed to give it a try. And so, our planning committee doubled in size, as the ACP added representatives. And we pretty much started over, program-wise. We explained what we had already put together, but they vetoed a number of the speakers we had lined up, because they were too evangelical or not sufficiently politically correct or, for some other reason, weren’t properly palatable to their diverse constituencies. But we found some middle ground. Mark Noll of Wheaton College keynoted the opening session marvelously. Sandi Patti (sister-in-law of one of our committee members) gave us a concert to close the convention. I even did a seminar for editors of small-budget publications.
However, the two groups were too distinctly different. I deemed the convention a noble experiment worth trying once, but not repeating. And I don’t think they have tried a joint convention again.
However, I clearly remember a prayer by one of the mainline guys in the opening session, a prayer that had a profound and enduring impact on me, though you’ll consider it trivial when I tell you why. In that prayer, this guy prayed for Terry Anderson, one of the hostages being held in Lebanon at that time. And the way he injected it into his prayer, I knew that his prayers always included Terry Anderson. Meanwhile, I couldn’t remember hearing anyone in evangelical circles (like, my own denomination) pray for Terry Anderson, this man who was suffering unjustly. Why was Terry Anderson not on our minds? And why did this “liberal” guy remember Terry as a routine part of his prayer life?
That prayer awakened me to the fact that some of our “liberal” friends are sensitive to issues that we evangelicals need to be sensitive to. Issues of justice, race, poverty, health, hunger, suffering, and much more. These things are on their radar. They aren’t much on our radar. And they need to be.
