Chechen bandits with empty souls

Dimitri Petrov quickly realized that the men who shot out the tires on his humanitarian-aid truck weren't fighting for the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya.

The situation was worse than that. The gunmen were bandits. They weren't interested in politics or religion or debates about freedom and international law. They didn't care if the food and medicine was destined for Moslems or Christians or anyone else in the village of Aki-Yurt, on the border of Ingushetia and Chechnya, back on Sept. 20, 1997.

"The bandits have no nationality. They have absolutely nothing in their souls," said Petrov, a Russian national who was working for the Baltimore-based International Orthodox Christian Charities when he was kidnapped.

After moving Petrov and his colleague Dmitri Penkovsky five times, the raiders consigned them to a cold, dark, unventilated cement pit hidden under a metal plate and a parked car. A previous prisoner, probably from the Russian military, had carved marks in the wall trying to chart the days of his ordeal.

Once a day, or less, the relief workers were fed potato soup and bread. Penkovsky was released after six months. Petrov, who believes he suffered a heart attack while in captivity, was set free after 11 months. Leaders of their relief agency -- citing security concerns -- declined to answer questions about the terms of their release.

There are parts of this world too dangerous and too remote to be featured in the tiny video universe of the evening news. It didn't make news when these humanitarian workers were kidnapped, and it wasn't news when they were released. But it was news in the churches in which people prayed for them, day after day, rite after rite. It's a strange day when church bulletins contain about as much life-and-death international news as many newspapers.

The remote mountains of Chechnya, located between the Black and Caspian seas, may look like heaven, but they've a slice of hell right now. Humanitarian workers and missionaries vanish and die on a regular basis. More than 40,000 people have died in a savage, but largely unnoticed, war since Chechen nationalists declared their independence from the Russian Federation in 1991. Petrov said that, at the most, the secessionist government controls a mere third of the state. The rest is up for grabs.

"It is an area of the world that is just as violent and unstable as the Balkans, if not more so," said Alexis Troubetzkoy, the International Orthodox Christian Charities representative for Russia. "It is an area of incredible beauty, but also of incredible hatreds. ^?The conflict there is so complex and so desperate that it is almost impossible to describe."

The situation has degenerated to the point that "it is the bandits who have the real power. It is just evil. They will do anything. Thieves are stealing from thieves," said Petrov, speaking through a translator during a prayer service with supporters in the Baltimore area.

The result was a chaotic game of hide-and-seek in a land in which the economy is in ruins and civic order is a cruel joke. At one point, another cell of bandits attempted to kidnap them away from their original captors, said Penkovsky. This is what the bandits do for a living, he explained. "They steal people."

They also kill. During their captivity, they heard their captives discuss the status of other prisoners. A pair of Baptist captives did not fare as well. One is still missing. The other was killed and his head left in a garbage bin, said Penkovsky.

While their captors did attempt to browbeat them into converting to Islam, Petrov and Penkovsky both said they are convinced that their kidnappers were inspired by greed, not political, cultural or spiritual convictions. This wasn't about religion -- it was about money. It wasn't about politics -- it was about raw power.

But pray for Chechnya, the men said. Prayer may be the only option left.

"People keep telling us that our release was a miracle," said Penkovsky. "The longer we are free and the more we learn, the more we believe this is true. This was a miracle. It takes a miracle to survive in Chechnya."

Caught in the Columbine crossfire

Heidi Johnson didn't volunteer to fight in America's culture wars, she got caught in the crossfire in the Columbine High School library.

A crowd of preachers, political activists, rock musicians and boisterous teens became extremely quiet last week when the willowy 16-year-old spoke at a rally on Capitol Hill in Washington. She is one of several survivors who has spoken at religious rallies and conventions and faced waves of media interviews. Still, she seemed poignantly out of place in the marble-and-gilt environs of a U.S. Senate caucus room.

She spoke quickly, keeping her voice under tight control as she moved through the minefield of her memories. April 20 was a normal day. She went to the library at lunch, as usual. She heard explosions. The shots drew closer. Then the gunners were right there, killing the kids who were under the library tables. The story hasn't changed. It was real.

"I saw things that no one should every have to see. My innocence was lost," said Johnson, at a rally urging students to back a Nov. 17 effort to spread the Ten Commandments in public schools, using T-shirts, book covers and signs.

"When kids are killing kids, it's time to go back to the basics," she said.

People keep asking Johnson and other survivors the same questions. But there are so many questions she can't answer -- including many of her own. She still isn't sure exactly what happened. It was hard to hear, in the cacophony of gunfire and taunts and screams and sobs. Johnson said she has "blanked some of it out" of her mind.

Many ask about the exchange between Cassie Bernall and her killer. Witnesses have said that a gunman asked, "Do you believe in God?" Bernall said, "Yes, I believe in God." The killer laughed and said, "Why?", then killed her. But some people claim he asked, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?", and blame the media for covering this up. Even more elaborate stories are circulating at rallies and on the Internet.

Johnson said she doesn't remember, but said other witnesses have told her they heard: "Do you believe in God?" No one knows why Eric Harris -- who Johnson said was doing most of the talking -- asked the question.

"It really doesn't matter. It wasn't really him talking," said Johnson. "When I saw his face and looked in his eyes, he just wasn't there. There was no one there. ... I believe he asked that because he was possessed. That question came from somewhere else."

In the weeks after the massacre, some commentators -- secular and religious -- have talked openly about evil and even the demonic. Some have quoted Pope John Paul II, who believes the principalities and powers of this age have created a "culture of death."

The killers, ultimately, were responsible for their actions, argued veteran speechwriter Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal. But they were symbolic figures. Children are like fish swimming in toxic images, ideas and values, she said. Some of the fish get sick.

Using news reports, Noonan drew a small pool of ink from this sea, containing: "...was found strangled and is believed to have been sexually molested. ...took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired. ...said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide. ...court battle over who owns the frozen sperm. ...contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women. ...died of lethal injection. ...had threatened to kill her babies. ..." And so forth and so on.

"What walked into Columbine High School," said Noonan, "was the culture of death."

Another Columbine student -- one of the dead -- made a similar point at last week's rally. A speaker read a letter from the mother of Rachel Scott, who was one of Columbine's most outspoken young Christians. The letter contained an entry from her daughter's journal, written days before her death.

"I'm dying," wrote Scott, describing the despair felt by many young people. "Quickly my soul leaves, slowly my body withers. It isn't suicide. I consider it homicide. The world you have created has led to my death."

A monk finds mercy, one step at a time

The last thing Father Andrew remembers from the afternoon of July 31, 1998 was asking his brother monk if he was too tired to continue driving back to New Mexico.

It had already been a tough day. They had taken the pre-dawn vigil hours as Orthodox Christians in eastern Colorado prayed the Psalms for 24 hours before the funeral of a friend killed in a car crash.

The young novice said he was tired, but OK. Father Andrew went to sleep, after reclining his seat all the way. That was probably what saved his life when the car tumbled off Interstate 25 near Pueblo, Colo. The 60-year-old monk was unconscious when rescuers pulled him from the wreck. Days later, he awoke and learned that Brother Mark -- the one novice at the fledgling St. Michael's Skete in Canones, N.M. -- had died.

Doctors warned him that massive head wounds cause pits of depression. Then there are the unique forms of doubt that stalk shepherds who feel lost in the wilderness.

"I have worked with many people who have struggled with depression. Looking back, I had no idea what they were dealing with," said Father Andrew, who asked that his secular name not be used since monks strive to leave their pasts behind. "It's not that you feel sorry for yourself. You just don't feel -- anything. I kept praying: 'God, have mercy on me.' "

A "skete" is a small community that is not yet a monastery. St. Michael's is a 15-acre enclave on a gravel road 90 minutes northwest of Santa Fe, where the high desert hits the mountains. For a decade, Father Andrew and a few supporters have worked in an old adobe house, a chapel shed and a cellar in which they make 10,000 beeswax candles a month, to sell to churches. Working foot by foot, they also are turning pumice, concrete and Ponderosa pine into a small sanctuary blending Spanish architecture and Russian Orthodox tradition. Brother Mark's arrival had been a sign of hope.

"You can't help but ask questions," said Father John Bethancourt of Santa Fe's Holy Trinity Orthodox Mission, who has spent many hours working at the skete. "But I believe God is building something here. I believe God will send other monks. ... We need more monks and more monasteries, not less. I don't think we can afford to lose one."

Father Andrew had faced tough times before during his own battle with alcoholism and then in years of work as a rehabilitation counselor. He also had been an Episcopal pastor, before he became an Orthodox monk. He already knew the answers to many tough questions.

"What was really tough was that before, when bad things happened in my life, I knew it was my fault," he said. "When I was drinking and stuff, I could see why I kept getting in trouble. But why this? Why now?"

During walks with his Australian shepherd, which also survived the crash, the monk gazed at the splendor in his valley. Yet he heard "dark voices" in his head muttering that death was the only reality and everything else was illusion. He heard echoes of his agnostic next-door neighbor during his Texas boyhood and his physics professor at the University of the South whose skepticism verged on nihilism.

There was no moment of epiphany. Father Andrew kept saying his prayers, doing his work and accepting invitations to fellowship and worship with others - even when he felt dead. He began reading works by believers active in science, medicine and public life. He didn't run from his questions.

Just before Christmas, a horrible cold put the weakened monk flat on his back. He said he turned on the radio and was assaulted by "every lousy Christmas record I had ever heard in my life." He fled to church and his cloud of depression lifted during the Christmas rites.

A year after the crash, Father Andrew said he continues to pray for God's mercy, while seeking answers to his questions. It's that simple, but not easy.

"I am supposed to continue a monastic life. I know that much," he said. "I still want to know what God wants to have happen here at the skete. I don't have a broad vision about the future. That's in God's hands, not mine. I have to take one step at a time."

Faith? An issue of human rights?

WASHINGTON -- The reports pour in via a handful of understaffed and overlooked religion news services that have sprung up on the Internet.

In Pakistan, two Christians were jailed after they clashed with a vendor who refused to serve them ice cream in the same bowls offered to Muslims.

"I do not have any bowls for Christians," he said, according to the Compass Direct news service. The brothers were accused of attacking Islam, under a statute that, if read literally, calls for execution. Their families fled into hiding. Supporters -- including some Muslims -- are trying to find them a lawyer willing to take the case.

In Iran, the fate of 13 jailed Jews remains unclear. In Russia, an extremist stabbed a leading rabbi. In China, the battered and lifeless body of Father Yan Weiping was found in a Beijing street, hours after the underground Catholic priest was arrested during an illegal Mass. In Tibet, the United Nations-sponsored World Bank is helping the Chinese government move more people into territory seized from Buddhists.

Then there are the Catholics in India and the secret missionaries in North Korea and the terrified evangelicals in Saudi Arabia and, in the Egyptian town called El-Kosheh, hundreds of Coptic believers continue to insist that they were placed under false arrest and tortured by police.

The inaugural meeting of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom was held shortly before a recent summit between President Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Before moving on to housekeeping issues -- finding office space, naming a staff -- the nine-member commission quickly produced statements on the scandal in Iran and Egypt.

"The Coptic community is finding it increasingly difficult to practice its faith freely," said the commission. "If the situation of Coptic Christians is raised with him President Mubarak will understand how strongly millions of Americans care about these reported human rights violations and about the future of the largest Christian community in the Middle East."

The problem, of course, is that Egypt is financially and strategically tied to the United States. Mubarak also faces tensions at home between competing Islamic factions. And religious freedom remains such a messy issue, the kind that sophisticated diplomats and business leaders prefer to avoid.

"You still have people in the bureaucracies saying, 'That's really a RELIGIOUS issue, not a HUMAN RIGHTS issue, and if we raise it, that could make people get testy,' " said Catholic activist Nina Shea of Freedom House, a commission member. "Some people even say that treating religious freedom as a human rights issue will violate the separation of church and state."

Nevertheless, the commission has staked out a three-part agenda for its early work: focusing on documented cases in China and Sudan; investigating new reports from settings such as Pakistan, India and Russia; and preparing materials to educate U.S. diplomats about the realities of religious persecution.

But the commission, said Shea, also faces another challenge -- investigating the current status of U.S. policies in this area, agency by agency and nation by nation.

"Let's take Sudan," she said. "If what is taking place there is truly genocide, and, at Freedom House, we're convinced that it is, then surely dealing with the reality of genocide would affect U.S. policy. Right?"

While the commission cannot ignore "geopolitical realities," its chairman stressed that it will do everything it can to convince government officials, the media and the public that religious persecution is, in fact, a human rights issue.

Clearly, many nations do not share America's commitment to religious liberty, said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In some nations, there are ties that bind the ruling party or regime to a specific faith. At this point, members of religious minorities can be seen as dangerous rebels, enemies of the state or foreign agents who are attacking the culture's traditional values.

But this kind of conflict occurs whenever people from different cultures discuss human rights, said the chairman of the commission. One person's religious liberty is another person's Western cultural imperialism.

"Religious freedom is an essential human right, a matter of freedom of conscience," said Saperstein. "We, hopefully, will be able to convince the world that we are right on this issue."

Just another story about Sudan

WASHINGTON -- A story can be inspirational without having a happy ending.

Activist Jim Jacobson of Christian Freedom International is used to seeing suffering during his illegal visits to Southern Sudan, where war bands sent by Khartoum's Islamist regime continue to terrorize Christians, animists and even other Muslims. But his face still clouds over when he describes what happened this April to a tribal matriarch in the burned-out village of Akoch Payam.

It's not an unusual story. That's the problem. It's a frighteningly ordinary snapshot of life in the overseas twilight zones in which intolerance, violence, politics and big business are creating nightmares for many believers.

"Religious persecution is so widespread and the issue is so complex. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing that governments and bureaucrats can do," said Jacobson, a former Reagan White House staff member who now works in hands-on relief work. "There are so many stories to tell that you can end up leaving people stunned. I mean, everybody talks about Sudan and China. But this is bigger than that. Things are happening all over the world."

To cite one example, Jacobson noted that he has made nine trips into Burma during the past 12 months, leading "backpack medical teams" into areas in which the government is pitting Buddhists against Baptists, with tragic results. He's also watching events unfold here in the nation's capital, where the new U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom - which grew out of legislation passed last year - is holding its first meetings.

Meanwhile, Sudan's hellish civil war is finally receiving attention because of a strong media hook - the renewal of slave trade. But, again, the story is more complex than that.

When Jacobson's plane landed, a family rushed out with the body of a grandmother named Anchor Ring. She had been hacked with a machete as more raiders rolled through the region on horseback, stealing the latest United Nations shipment of food and kidnapping new slaves to carry away the spoils. The head wound was so deep that Jacobson and a journalist traveling with him could see the yellow membrane around her brain.

Her tribesmen pleaded: Could the plane carry her to Lokichokio? A hospital there, just over the border in Kenya, offered the latest in Western technology.

"We radioed the U.N. compound, but we already knew what would happen," said Jacobson. "They asked if she had a passport and visa to travel into Kenya. Right! Does she have a passport and visa? First of all, we're hundreds of miles out in the bush. It's like stepping back 6,000 years in time out there. On top of that, we're in rebel territory in the middle of a civil war. Who has the power to give out passports? The government in Khartoum, that's who."

No, she didn't have a passport and visa. Then the hospital is full, said a U.N. official.

The tribesmen could see that the plane was half-empty and they struggled to grasp the politics of the situation. They didn't understand that, just over the border, bureaucrats were waiting with a book of regulations. They would make Jacobson turn the plane around and take the injured woman back into the bush, back into the war zone in which her grandchildren were being kidnapped and sold into slavery. It would cost nearly $10,000 to make the symbolic gesture of flying her to the hospital, knowing she would be turned away.

Jacobson did what he could, leaving behind medical supplies that might save her life.

Whenever he tells this story, listeners want to know if Anchor Ring survived. And what about the others injured in the raid? What about those who were kidnapped as slaves? What about the burned houses, the burned churches?

"I don't know what happened to her," said Jacobson. "There's no easy way to communicate with those villages, except to go there. We'll have to go back and we will go back. There's just so many places we need to go, right now."

Worship '99: Buy incense now...

The worshippers may gather in a candle-lit sanctuary and follow a liturgy of ancient texts and solemn chants, while gazing at Byzantine icons.

The singing, however, will be accompanied by waves of drums and electric guitars and the result often sounds like a cross between Pearl Jam and the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The icons, meanwhile, are digital images downloaded from the World Wide Web and projected on screens.

The people who are experimenting with these kinds of rites aren't interested in the bouncy Baby Boomer-friendly megachurch praise services that have dominated American Protestantism for a generation. They want to appeal to teens and young adults who consider "contemporary worship" shallow and old-fashioned and out of touch with their darker, more ironic take on life. They are looking for what comes next.

It might be smart to buy incense now, before prices rise.

"People are trying all kinds of things trying to find an edge," said the Rev. Daniel Harrell, a staff member of Boston's historic Park Street Church who is active in ministry to the so- called "Generation X" and other young adults.

"They'll go online and go to Brother Jim's icon page. Then they right-click with a mouse, save some icons and they're in business. The basic attitude is, 'It's old. It's real. Let's put it up on the screen and play a grinding grunge worship song. That'll be cool.' "

The result is what Harrell, writing in the journal Leadership, has called "post-contemporary worship." If previous generations of free-wheeling Protestants have tried to strip away layers of tradition and ritual, in an attempt to appeal to modern people, some of today's emerging church planters are trying to add a few doses of beauty and mystery. They are trying to create - on their own terms - new traditions out of the pieces of old traditions.

It helps to realize that almost every church found in an American telephone book has been buffeted, for several decades, by changes caused by television, rock 'n'roll, the Internet and every other form of popular culture. Vatican II opened the door to neo-Protestant changes in Catholic hymnody and worship, while some influential Protestants have been digging into their ancient roots. Others have openly tried to incorporate elements of drama, humor and film into user-friendly services for the media age.

"While some churches are busy buying brand-new hymnals, others are discarding theirs, not to be replaced," noted John Witvliet, director of the Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College. "Some churches are approaching such changes eagerly and expectantly; others are embroiled in 'worship wars.'"

If the Baby Boomers shunned churches that they thought were pompous and boring, then their pierced, tattooed and media-numbed children appear ready to shun churches that feel fake and frivolous. The key, according to Harrell, is that worship services must feel real. Services are judged to be authentic when they feel authentic.

"It's not that feeling has totally replaced doctrine, or anything like that," he said. "The people who are doing this have doctrine. In fact, they are usually very, very conservative - almost fundamentalist. But they may know little or nothing about the doctrines that actually go with the symbols and the rituals and the words they are using."

The final product is uneven, to say the least. Protestant piety collides with Catholic language and Orthodoxy iconography is grafted into charismatic prayers. These experimental churches noted Harrell, are almost always based on a "free church" concept of government in which all decisions are local. A shepherd and his flock can change from one style of worship to another with a show-of-hands vote in a mid-week committee meeting, if they want to do so.

"So people are borrowing things from all of these traditions, often without realizing that some of these symbols and rites may even clash with each other," he said. "It's easy to be cynical about this, but they really are searching for something. They are borrowing other people's images and rites and experiences, as part of their own search for something that feels authentic. They are trying to step into the experiences of others."

Chalk one up for God?

Virtually anyone linked to God and cyberspace gets the same letter several times a year as it's copied and forwarded, and copied and forwarded, from one e-mail list to another -- World Wide Web without end, amen.

It contains a "true story" about an atheistic philosopher at the University of Southern California, a courageous student, a piece of chalk and a miracle. The letter ends by challenging the reader to pass it on, rather than hitting the delete key. Clearly, readers are supposed to have enough faith to keep this evangelistic chain letter going.

Well, the philosophy faculty at USC doesn't have enough blind faith to let this story keep making the rounds. In a few weeks the department will - after years of calls, letters and email -- add a front-page link to its Internet site offering a pack of proof that the story simply isn't true.

"I don't think the people who keep sending this around mean any harm and I can understand why it appeals so much to some people, especially to some Christians, who often feel like they are treated poorly in academia," said Edwin McCann, director of the school of philosophy. "But if people fall for this story because it bolsters their faith, and pass it on, they're spreading around something that isn't true. Serious believers need to base their belief on truth."

The most popular version of this tale describes an event that happened "a few years ago" in a required class that one professor annually dedicated to his belief that God could not exist. For 20 years, no student had dared to answer when he shouted, at the end of the semester: "If there is anyone here who still believes in Jesus, stand up!"

Then the professor would hold up a piece of chalk and challenge God to keep it from hitting the floor. Every year it shattered into tiny pieces. Finally, a freshman - after months of prayer - dared to make a stand. The professor called him a fool and proceeded to perform his famous chalk test. However, this time the chalk slipped, hit his shirt cuff, rolled down his leg and off his shoe - unbroken.

"The professor's jaw dropped as he stared at the chalk," says the story. "He looked up at the young man and then ran out of the lecture hall. The young man ...proceeded to walk to the front of the room and share his faith in Jesus for the next half an hour. Three hundred students stayed and listened as he told of God's love for them and of his power through Jesus."

The story usually arrives in a letter from someone who received it from a friend who knew someone who heard the story from another friend who knew a student who saw it happen.

Meanwhile, McCann freely testifies that this hasn't happened during his 14 years at USC, or during the 32-year tenure of the noted Christian philosopher Dallas Willard. Plus, there is no required course that fits this description and the only class, in this era, that has had the same professor for 20 years doesn't address the issue of God's existence and so forth and so on.

An epistle McCann will soon post online traces the story to a 1977 book called "70 Years of Miracles." In that account, author Richard Harvey shares an anonymous account of an atheistic scientist who performs a similar classroom test of faith with a glass beaker - in the 1920s.

Also, the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society's massive Internet site dedicated to collecting and dissecting "urban legends" (http://www.snopes.com) notes that a similar story appears in a tract from the anti-Catholic scribe Jack Chick. The current story reached the Internet in 1996 and one reader wrote the site to say it already was circulating in California in 1968.

Actually, the true miracle would be if 300 modern students sat in a classroom for more than 60 seconds when they were not required to do so, noted Barbara Mikkelson, a curator of the urban-legend site.

Chalk this one up as a charming parable, one not grounded in the facts as reported," she said. "It's David and Goliath in a classroom."

A new Presbyterian Reformation?

The two men spoke on the same topic, on the same day and at luncheons early in the same gathering -- the 211th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

But Harvard University minister Peter Gomes and ex-gay counselor Joe Dallas found radically different messages when they opened their Bibles.

Right now, said Gomes, the forces of biblical literalism are waging a campaign of "textual harassment" against those who want to welcome gays and lesbians into the ministry and bless same-sex unions at church altars. But progressives must not surrender to those who are bound by "fear and ignorance," he told the Covenant Network of Presbyterians.

"The cause is just," said Gomes, an openly gay Baptist who leads Harvard's Memorial Church. "The experience of the gospel is in your direction. You are sailing with the wind of the Holy Spirit. You are on the Lord's side."

The Covenant Network luncheon Monday symbolized one side in what Presbyterian politicos call the "Battle of the Amendments," which continued all this week at the assembly in Fort Worth, Texas. After a year of debate, the church's regional presbyteries in 1997 voted 97 to 74 to add Amendment B to its Book of Order, stating that ministers must "live either in fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness." A year later, the presbyteries voted 59 to 114 to defeat Amendment A, which would have required "fidelity and integrity in all relationships."

Dallas spoke at a luncheon sponsored by OneByOne, a ministry within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) created to minister to "those in conflict with their sexuality." He stressed that those backing a pro-homosexual view of ordination and marriage have based their arguments on their feelings and experiences, not on scripture.

"The real question in assessing relationships is not, 'Is it loving?', but, 'Is it right or wrong?'," said Dallas, who lived for years in gay relationships before he got married and became an ex-gay leader. "The scriptures on homosexuality are unambiguous in both testaments. The only relationship considered best is a monogamous relationship between one man and one woman."

That's one way to read the Bible, said Gomes. But as inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, he said Covenant Network supporters could believe in the vitality and authority of the Bible without "bowing down to some inerrant text or to some absolute school of exegesis" from the past.

"God speaks in the present tense," said the Harvard theologian. "Now, it is interesting to know what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Antioch, what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Chalcedon, even what the Spirit was saying to the churches in Geneva. But it is equally important to ask, 'What is the Spirit saying to the churches today, in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), in the last year of the 20th Century?' "

Gomes was preaching to the choir. Covenant Network leaders already have portrayed themselves as the true defenders of a tradition that allows each generation to reform earlier interpretations of scriptures, creeds and confessions. As a touchstone, they cite a 1924 document written when other Presbyterians defeated a conservative attempt to enforce "biblical inerrancy" and literal interpretations of the virgin birth, the atonement and the resurrection.

"With respect to the interpretation of the Scriptures, the position of our church has been that common to Protestants," noted the Auburn Declaration. While Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches stress the authority of centuries of church teachings about the Bible, "our church lays it upon its ministers and others to read and teach the Scriptures as the Spirit of God through His manifold ministries instructs them, and to receive all truth which from time to time He causes to break forth from the Scriptures."

Winning this debate over the Bible and tradition remains crucial for the left in today's battles over sexuality, marriage and ordination, said Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City, in a paper circulated by the Covenant Network.

"We must," she said, "develop a clear, compelling demonstration that our understanding of ordination will make the church more Presbyterian than it is now, or we will not prevail."

Death of a seminary visionar

Early in his first pastorate, the Rev. Clyde McDowell was hit with one crisis after another and none of them seem to have been covered in his seminary textbooks.

The son of a church member got caught up in a bad drug deal. Then a girl ran away from home. Then a boy was tossed out of school for threatening someone with a hunting knife. Then there was a guilty wife and an angry husband and a messy sexual affair. Then McDowell had to climb out on a roof to talk to a suicidal member of the youth group, who was holding at shotgun.

His early sermons and church board meetings were tough, too.

"I felt like I was lost and nobody had given me a set of directions," he told me, a decade ago. "I knew a lot about the Bible, but I didn't know how to be a pastor."

McDowell survived and then thrived. Then, in 1996, the 46-year-old pastor accepted the challenge of being a seminary president. He was emerging as a new voice in a critical debate about the future of seminaries. But doctors discovered he had a brain tumor only 16 months after he became president of Denver Seminary. He died on June 7.

It's crucial to understand that McDowell did not want to "modernize" the process of seminary education, but to embrace an older model. He wanted ministers to do their studies while surrounded by flocks of real believers and the experienced shepherds who lead them.

Today, most seminaries are structured like graduate schools and teach clergy a specialized theological language that often makes it harder to talk to lay people, said the Rev. Leith Anderson, a nationally known author and megachurch pastor who is serving as Denver Seminary's interim president. It helps to contrast this with the approach used in medical schools, in which students are quickly given a white coats and, under the watch-care of mentors, asked to do case studies on real people while continuing classroom work.

"Would you want to go see a doctor who had been to med school and had taken all the right courses, but had never touched a patient the whole time he was there?", asked Anderson. "Would you want to be that first patient? I think not. So, would you want to be in somebody's first church if they had taken all the right seminary courses, but had never had any contact with real people and real pastors? I think not."

Nevertheless, many faculty members believe the core courses in the archetypal seminary curriculum have been carved in stone. Meanwhile, stressed-out pastors face media-saturated homes, workaholic parents and children who seem mature and frighteningly immature at the same time. When it comes to spiritual answers, their people are as likely to turn to Oprah and "The X-Files" as to church programs.

Many growing churches have responded to all of this by ceasing to hire seminary-educated men and women. Some train their new leaders on their own.

These issues were swirling around Denver Seminary in the early 1990s, when I taught courses there focusing on mass media and popular culture. I led a number of forums with McDowell at the nearby Mission Hills Baptist Church, which grew from 600 to 1,700 members during his 13-year tenure. His vision was already taking shape.

At some point, he said, people needed to know that pastors truly understood the issues they faced in daily life. This would require more than adding a few course titles in the seminary curriculum and increasing the amount of audio-visual equipment on campus. While he didn't what to short-change the study of doctrine, he had decided that seminaries couldn't settle for teaching truth as a list of statements on a test.

Competent, healthy pastors, he said, must be able to live the truth, as well as write academic papers about it.

"They must be truth implementers," stressed McDowell, in one 1997 essay. "They must know how the truth applies to this age whether it's the Age of Aquarius, the Age Wave or the New Age. In this age of unbelief, belief comes hard to those who only hear the words of preaching, but see little evidence in life."