The 1960s were not a good time for evangelicals. For one thing, the Methodist liberal establishment did not even want to admit evangelicals were evangelicals. When I went to the head of the chapel committee at my Methodist seminary and asked if we might be able to include some evangelicals among the chapel speakers, I was informed that everyone at the seminary was evangelical, and just who did I have in mind. When I explained he replied, “I believe you are talking about fundamentalists and we’re not going to share our pulpit with any of them.” When Billy Graham came to Chicago and some of us wanted to ask Graham to visit our campus, the president of the school said, “No, because we do not wish to be identified with that kind of Christianity.”
ScreenCap from Good News website
Good News Mag Cover
The school was supposedly “broadminded” which meant we included extreme radical liberals, extreme liberals, liberals, moderate liberals, and moderates. The moderates were neo-orthodox. There were no evangelicals, no fundamentalists, no conservatives. We were told on many occasions fundamentalism was the drag that kept the church from advancing. And advancing we were. It was the day of Death of God, the Secular City, liberation theology, rising feminism, process theology, and existentialism. As for “fundamentalism” – it was dying and had no viable future.
But some of us were very aware that there was another world out there, whether recognized by the seminary and the church leaders or not, and that it was very much alive. That is the world Chuck Keysor was writing about in an article that appeared in the Christian Advocate fifty years ago, on July 19, 1966, entitled, “Methodism’s Silent Minority.” The article triggered the beginning of Good News and the evangelical renewal movements and is the reason why 2016 can be marked as the 50th year anniversary of evangelical renewal in the United Methodist Church. The article opened with these words:
Within the Methodist church in the United States is a silent minority group. It is not represented in the higher councils of the church. Its members seem to have little influence in Nashville, Evanston, or on Riverside Drive. Its concepts are often abhorrent to Methodist officialdom at annual conference and national levels.
I speak of those Methodists who are variously called “evangelicals” or “conservatives” or “fundamentalists.” A more accurate description is “orthodox,” for these brethren hold a traditional understanding of Christian faith.
Keysor went on in the article to explain that this minority was often accused of being narrow-minded, naïve, contentious and potentially schismatic. That was unfortunate, said Keysor, these people love the church and have been faithful Methodists all their lives. In making his case Keysor mentioned that there were many more of them than official Methodism was counting. At least 10,000 churches, for example, were using Bible-based Sunday school material instead of the official Methodist material. The 10,000 figures brought strong reaction and led to charges of irresponsibility and plain out lying. But Keysor knew whereof he spoke. Trained as a journalist he had served as managing editor of Together magazine, Methodism’s popular family magazine. . He had then been converted in a Billy Graham crusade and spent some years as an editor at David C. Cook. The 10,000 churches figure had come from his years at Cook. He knew more about what churches were not using Methodist materials than did the Nashville editors. At Cook he also became aware of the evangelical world. He then attended Garrett and became a pastor in Elgin, Illinois.
Keysor’s article drew more responses than any other article Christian Advocate had ever published. The responses followed a common theme: “You have spoken our mind. We didn’t know there were others who believed like we did. What can we do?”
The obvious response from Keysor, a trained journalist, was to start a magazine. He ran the idea past one church leader he respected highly, Bishop Gerald Kennedy. Though not necessarily evangelical in theology Kennedy was a hero of sorts to evangelicals because he had served as head of the Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles in 1963. In 1964 Kennedy was featured in Time magazine and declared the “unofficial spokesman for Methodism.” Kennedy was much more sensitive to the evangelical world than most of the other Methodist leadership. Kennedy expressed enthusiasm for Keysor’s idea and said he would support however he could. When Vol. 1 No. 1 issue of Good News was published Kennedy wrote the feature article, “The Place of Evangelicals in the Methodist Church Today.”
The other most encouraging response was from the Rev. Spurgeon Dunnam of Texas Methodist newspaper (later the United Methodist Reporter newspaper, not affiliated with the current online Reporter version). In the Sept. 6, 1968, issue, Dunnam editorialized that the church needed a conservative voice. The liberal voice was presented by the official Methodist press with Christian Advocate and Concern (Dunnam was one who recognized that an official press was basically public relations-oriented and thus reflected the views of the leadership) and thus could use a conservative voice to present balance.
The Texas Methodist is pleased to make known to its readers that within the past year a responsible “conservative” journal of opinion has been born within the United Methodist Church. It is called simply Good News, and we think it is just that.
But the magazine and the movement were not universally so well received. There were no “big names” or established leaders who identified with Good News in the early years. There was much behind the scene encouragement but on a number of occasions persons indicated they were reluctant to identify themselves with a controversial group for fear they might be considered to be disloyal. The South, sometimes called the most conservative area of the church, was also the most institutional and it is telling that most of the early supporters of Good News were concentrated in central United States from New Jersey to Iowa, and not from the South.
One critic, Marcuis E. Taber, wrote an article that also appeared in Christian Advocate (May 13, 1971) titled, “An Ex-Fundamentalist Looks at the Silent Minority.” According to Tabor Good News was an “ultra-fundamentalist” movement with an emphasis on literalism and minute rules which was opposed to the spirit of Jesus.
The Christian Advocate gave Keysor a chance to respond and so he did in the fall of 1971. The response, classic Keysor, was perceptive, straightforward and prophetic. It said basically that Tabor and others were reading the church situation wrongly. Storms were battering the UM Church and soon it will be forced to jettison more of its proud “liberal” superstructure. If there was a right side of history it was with evangelical renewal. This is what it meant to be “a new church for a new world.”
Was Keysor right? Fifty later we can debate his conclusions.
The Rev. Dr. Riley B. Case is a retired clergy member of the Indiana Conference and an associate director with the Confessing Movement. He is the author "Evangelical and Methodist A Popular History" (Abingdon Press).