The commitment of so many Christians to suffer for righteousness sake is astonishing and puts a contemporary pastor like myself to shame. The book is a fair data based over view of the conflict with Nazism up until 1943. The intent is not to emphasize the persecution but the spiritual resistance and it achieves this goal. May God grant us the boldness of these leaders and grant us revival.

The book “Christian Counter-Attack: Europe’s Churches Against Nazism” was written by four men to relay a factual account of the response of the churches across Europe to the invasion during WWII by the Nazi Germans. It is written in 1943 and so provides a unique perspective on the War since it was written during the War.
The book covers the Roman Catholic and Protestant response in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France. It also covers the response of the Eastern Orthodox churches in Yugoslavia, Greece, and occupied Russia. Finally it touches on Italy, Finland, and Hungary. It concludes with a few questions about the future.
The writers of the book seem to have a hope that Roman Catholics and Protestants might be united in their common witness to Christ. It is interesting how the War awakened this hope as Roman Catholics and Protestants have also stood side by side on matters of life and sexuality in the last 50 yrs in North America.
In the introduction the writers make a number of points that display a common approach in the response of Europe’s Churches. (1) The Christian Church survives in spite of insidious and furious attacks. (2) The resistance of the church was primarily on spiritual and not political grounds. (3) The War created a Christian self consciousness or togetherness in Christ. They point out that ”the action of the Church leaders, though based on deep Christian grounds, has led to collaboration with others who care for human dignity and freedom.”
Throughout Europe you see how many church leaders saw the antithesis between Christianity and Nazism as a tension between light and darkness, Christianity and paganism.
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In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
More than 20 years ago, Olan Stubbs was trying to share his faith with two guys in his freshman class at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. It wasn’t working.
One sat on the dorm steps outside and smoked weed. When Stubbs attempted to explain verses to him, he said he didn’t believe the Bible. The other was a football player “who could articulate the gospel better than I could. But he was often coming in late at night, drunk. Obviously there was some kind of disconnect.”
Stubbs didn’t know what to say or do. Then he heard about two RAs on the second floor who were leading a Bible study. They’d led someone he knew to Christ.
“I’d love to learn how to share my faith like you guys are doing,” he told them. They handed him a booklet by Navigators founder Dawson Trotman and told him to “get involved in Campus Outreach.”
Campus Outreach was famous for its evangelism, founded by a church famous for its evangelism, planted by a man famous for his evangelism.
Stubbs was hooked. Today, he’s one of nearly 750 Campus Outreach staff serving on 122 campuses in 11 countries. In its 40 years, Campus Outreach has seen 55,000 students at evangelistic events. Staff and volunteers have discipled 15,000 students over weekly Bible studies and worship times—1,447 of them have gone on to serve in ministry or missions. Over the last 12 months alone, 712 students have professed their faith in Christ.
Stubbs works at Briarwood Presbyterian Church, where Campus Outreach began. The church was planted in 1960 and grew to 4,000 members largely on the strength of personal evangelism. “The Great Commission has been our heartbeat,” the website says, and it’s not kidding: Briarwood partners with more than 100 mission boards and organizations and more than 300 ministry staff.
Briarwood got that heartbeat from its founder.
“If you meet a Christian in Birmingham who is 60 or older, and you ask them how they came to Christ, I’d bet my money that at some point they’ll mention Frank Barker,” Stubbs said.
The 86-year-old Barker has led many thousands to Christ—his daughter Peggy Townes estimated 10,000 personally and hundreds of thousands through his ministries. But it wasn’t because he loved talking to people. He’s not a gregarious personality or even a compelling speaker.
“I’d like to just settle in and read a book,” he said. “But the Bible tells us to reach out to others, so I had to discipline myself to do that.”
Turns out, that was catching.
Later to Faith than to Ministry
Barker came to ministry late, and to faith even later.
Beginning in high school, “I was living a pretty wild life morally,” Barker told TGC. From lying to his parents to throwing eggs at people to drinking too much (and then driving), Barker knew he wasn’t living a good life, but couldn’t pull himself out of it.
Playing tennis restricted his rowdiness, but not a lot and not for long. He went to college on an ROTC scholarship, then became a jet pilot in the United States Navy.
One weekend, while in flight training school, “I came back up to Birmingham and had a wild weekend,” Barker said.

On his way back to Pensacola, he fell asleep at the wheel, and when the road curved, his car sped onto a rutted-out dirt road. When he finally got the car stopped, the headlights picked up a sign nailed to a tree: “The wages of sin is death.”
“I thought, You know what? I think God is trying to tell me something,” he said. “I started trying to straighten up. I felt I’d been so bad that if I was going to get to heaven, I was going to need to be a preacher.”
Barker kept swinging between resolving to do better and partying until one night, when he felt God was actually listening to the rote prayer he tossed up. He told God he wanted to follow him.
Barker began to stay home from the wild nights with his friends; after his tour of duty, he enrolled at Columbia Theological Seminary. A month in, he inherited from his roommate a preaching gig at an Alabama church.
“The first year, nothing particularly good happened,” he said. “At the end of that year, I thought, Something’s wrong. I wonder if I’m really a Christian.”
It was an awkward question to ask his professors or congregants, but he knew an Air Force chaplain, and asked him. (“Joe, how can I make sure I’m a Christian?”)
The chaplain gave Barker a tract and told him to put his trust in Jesus and receive salvation as a gift.
“That’s wrong,” Barker told him. “God’s not going to just give this thing away! You’ve got to work for it.”
The chaplain insisted, and Barker began to realize “I had totally missed that salvation was about grace. I surrendered my will and transferred my trust from me to Christ. When I did that, life began to change dramatically.”
Storefront Church
Among the first people Barker tried to evangelize were his parents, who were already saved. Then he told his sister, who accepted Christ. He told the handyman. He told his friends. He told his congregation, which began to grow.
After seminary, the Birmingham presbytery of the Presbyterian Church in the United States asked Barker if he’d organize a new church in the rapidly developing area of Cahaba Heights.
Intent on a PhD, he told them no.
They asked for the summer.
Just the summer, he agreed.
Barker knocked on doors and found so much interest in a new congregation that he skipped the Bible study stage of church planting and went right to the rented building, setting up in an old barber shop in a strip mall. That first Sunday, 70 people showed up. Three months in, Briarwood Presbyterian Church was chartered with 90 members.
Barker packed out the storefront church. Three years in, with 290 members, Briarwood moved into its own facility that could fit 400. (It was there the Presbyterian Church in America held its first meeting in December 1973.) A few years later, a 1,000-seat sanctuary was added.
In 1988, Briarwood moved into a facility that could fit 4,000. By the time Barker retired in 1998, membership had grown that large.
But they weren’t necessarily drawn in by the preaching.
“Kind of Boring”
“My father was not a dynamic orator by any means,” Townes said. “He’d shuffle up to the pulpit and say, ‘Uh, turn in your Bibles to 1 John 3,’ and then quietly read it and start preaching. There was nothing dynamic or big about it.”
“When I first visited Briarwood as a freshman in college, I was like, ‘This guy’s kind of boring,’” Stubbs said.
But Barker had the zeal of a new convert and the discipline of a Navy pilot.
“I had to train myself” to evangelize, Barker said. “You know, you get on an airplane thinking about the person you’re going to be sitting next to.”
At first, he didn’t know how to share his faith—“I didn’t learn it in seminary”—so he just kept telling the story of his own conversion.
“A lot of people in the 1960s could really identify with that, because they had a religious worldview: ‘There is a God, and I’m supposed to be a good person,’” Stubbs said.
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God is faithfully raising up new generations of men to shepherd His people and hold the PCA to faithfulness. Let us continue to pray His blessing upon His church for her next 50 years.

One former PCA Moderator characterized the Memphis Assembly as “the most significant in a generation.” The PCA has been at a crossroads (as noted among other places here, here, and here) as she decides whether to be a confessional, Reformed Church committed to walking in the old paths of piety and discipleship or a broadly evangelical, culturally missional, reactionary communion.
In Memphis, the Assembly chose to walk in the old paths of the Reformed faith as evidenced by both the acts of the assembly and the men elected to her permanent committees, agencies, and Standing Judicial Commission (SJC). In addition to the greater manifestation of unity, a return to growth numerically and in terms of giving, increased elder participation, and unity on chastity for officers, there were other, less obvious encouragements not to be overlooked regarding the health of the PCA. God is richly blessing the PCA.
1. Rising Ministerial Standards
Wednesday’s Assembly-Wide Seminar featured reflections and aspirations from four elders from the PCA’s founding generation. In his address, former Moderator TE Charles McGowan noted his recollection that the PCA was founded as a “big tent movement,” yet he remarked how the PCA has grown stronger and more “theologically focused.” He noted how in the early days, the PCA had received pastors who would not be received today, because our communion has become more “clearly and definitely Reformed.”
This is a welcome marker of good health for the PCA. Rather than loosening standards and confessional atrophy, the PCA’s expectations for ministers have become more robust as the denomination insists on a deeper commitment to Reformed Theology.
In his address to the First General Assembly, TE O. Palmer Robertson seemed to predict this very thing as he proclaimed,
By adopting the Westminster Confession of Faith as the basis for its fellowship and ministry, the Continuing Church takes its stand unequivocally for the faith once delivered to the saints…
…No narrowing fundamentalism is to mar the vision of this church as it searches out the implications of Scripture for the totality of human life. It is to the faith of Christianity in its fulness, as it relates to the whole of creation, that the Continuing Church commits itself. In humble dependence on the Holy Spirit to enlighten and empower, the Continuing Church commits itself to the Christian faith in its wholeness…
…Knowing his body to be one, we rejoice in the oneness we now experience, with all who are committed to the same precious faith. May the Lord of his church be pleased to hasten the perfecting of that unity with himself and among us, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ.”
TE Robertson’s proclamation those 50 years ago has proven true. The PCA is now more robustly Reformed with both high standards for officers and a zeal for the lost: to know Him and to make Him known. These increasingly high standards manifest a faith in God to sovereignly provide for His Church as we submit to the qualifications and the truths set forth in His word.
2. Commitment to Historic PCA Polity
The Hodge-Thornwell debate on church boards of the 19th Century continues to echo in the assemblies of the PCA. Overture 7 from Southern New England Presbytery proposed a small change to the Rules of Assembly Operation that required the committees and agency boards of the General Assembly to annually give account to the Assembly regarding their faithfulness to the Assembly’s instructions as well as submit any significant policy changes to the Assembly for approval.
This reinforces the PCA’s commitment not to have true “boards” for its agencies, but committees that are subservient to the General Assembly. In the old PCUS, the boards were the strongholds of liberalism and worldliness; the late TE Harry Reeder referred to this phenomenon not as “mission creep,” but mission exchange.
To prevent this, the PCA founding fathers designed a system of government to limit the power of PCA agencies by making them committees and dependent on the Assembly rather than with authority largely independent from the Assembly. You can read more about the development of and tension within the PCA’s polity in David Hall’s new volume surveying the PCA’s first half-century.
Fittingly at our 50th Assembly, the PCA reaffirmed her commitment to her historic ecclesiology as the Assembly adopted stronger language to hold accountable the permanent committees and agencies via the committees of commissioners.
This accountability promotes the health and efficacy of our agencies and committees; the permanent committees are able to develop vision and long-term strategies, while at the same time the General Assembly is able to more fully oversee their work and ensure a robust commitment to that Reformed faith of which TE McGowan spoke in his address. In this way both the permanent committees and committees of commissioners spur one another on to the fulfillment of the Great Commission and their specific missions.
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