Elder Statesman : Paul S.
Rees
"I can't remember a time when I wouldn't have considered myself a Christian of sorts," says Dr. Paul S. Rees, who has been called an elder statesman of the Christian faith.
Reared in a Christian home, this man of God, who is listed in Who's Who in America, was born in 1900 to a father who was a Quaker minister and a mother who was also a recorded minister in the Society of Friends.
Yet there came a definite time, when young Paul was a freshman at the University of Southern California, that he experienced what he calls his own assurance of salvation.
It was a very private affair, in the seclusion of his bedroom. But it was the beginning of a very public life that has spanned fifty years of active ministry as a pastor, ministerial superintendent, vice-president of the Evangelical Covenant Church of America, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, minister to ministers in Billy Graham Crusades, and vice-president and
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editor-at-large for World Vision International, the Christian humanitarian agency.
It was also the starting point for a student who was a philosophy major and who became very good at putting his point across in words: Paul has written fourteen books, including Don't Sleep Through the Revolution and Men of Action in the Book of Acts. He is also the author of numerous pamphlets on stewardship, evangelism, and the Holy Spirit. Frequently in demand as a lecturer, he has conducted missionary and preaching rallies, often addresses college groups and commencement assemblies, has spoken in sixty countries and for eighteen years was a radio preacher.
But Paul Rees, a kindly, soft-spoken man who, one suspects, must be adored by his grandchildren, has weathered the storms of life. He has felt the sting of rebuke and rejection at the hand of a famous Christian leader and erstwhile friend. He has suffered through the critical illness and untimely death of a beloved brother. He has comforted his wife in the death of their infant son. And he has known the tension caused by closed banks and canceled engagements during the Great Depression.
But in all these, Paul is more than a conquerer — through Christ, his Lord.
CRISES OF FAITH
The first big trauma Paul remembers happened when he was seventeen years old — prior to his assurance of salvation experience at USC.
Paul's father, Seth, became involved, at that time, in what Paul calls "a deep and serious misunderstanding with other Christian leaders."
"I saw my father suffer," Paul said as we talked early one summer morning in Paul's motel room in Arcadia, a few blocks from his occasional office at World Vision headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Monrovia. "It
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made an impression on me so deep it was a crisis — an ordeal — in my own life."
Young Paul keenly felt the injustice in his father's experience. But there was something that made an impression, deeper even, than this profound trauma. It was the absence of bitterness in Seth's Rees's spirit.
"The way in which my father prayed in his study and at our family altar set an example for me I've never forgotten," Paul said softly and evenly as the image of his father passed before his eyes. "It's an example for which I cannot but give thanks to God."
Paul added: "To witness the profound anguish of my father's spirit, but without bitterness or recrimination, was used by the Holy Spirit to give direction to my thinking about how a Christian should behave under provocation."
That memory of his father stood Paul in good stead thirty-seven years later.
But between the anguish of seeing his father's travail of soul and Paul's decision to prepare for the ministry came that bedroom experience when Paul was a freshman. Paul remembers being under the influence of a very strong, austere sermon he had heard on the doctrine of punishment for sin and the concept of hell as presented in the New Testament.
Paul admits fear was a motivating force in his decision to make sure his soul was right with the Lord. But he believes fear can be a legitimate means to lead people to a decisive act of choosing Christ. Yet, he would add immediately that the highest motive must be love. To him, the two seemed complementary rather than mutually exclusive. And so a decision of eternal destiny was made as he knelt alone in his room.
Close on the heels of that experience came a period of testing and turmoil about Paul's choice of a vocation. Paul's preferences, in order, were to be a lawyer or a college philosophy professor.
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SIGNALS FROM THE HOLY SPIRIT
But Paul kept getting signals from the Holy Spirit to go into the ministry. He described the resolution of the dilemma this way:
"When that came to a head, I had in a very quiet way an experience which went beyond merely my affirmation of what I now believe was God's call. It became what is variously described as the 'filling of the Spirit,' or 'full surrender,' or 'entire consecration.' "
Though Paul has had no experience of speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, it was to him a "total commitment, a deep feeling of reliance in the Holy Spirit — a very intimate sense of reliance."
About five years later, during a trip around the world in 1925 with his parents, sister, and younger brother, Paul faced what he calls another major test of his faith.
His brother Seth, Jr., who was sixteen at the time, became deathly ill in Japan with a severe case of small pox. Paul remembers his brother was broken out over his entire body.
Seth, Jr., was rushed to a small isolation center in Kobe, where he remained at death's door for days and days. Troubled by communications problems, the rest of the family, aliens in an alien land, were quartered in a nearby hotel. Their anguish was very intense, Paul vividly remembers, and they went to see his brother every day.
But because of the highly contagious nature of the disease, they were not allowed to enter the isolation center. They were required to stand back, in the open air, about twenty-five feet in front of the paperlike doors of the chamber where Seth, Jr., was confined.
One night, as Paul and his father, Seth, stood there, they were both sure Seth, Jr., was going to die. They left, sorrowfully, and Seth's body shook with sobs as he and Paul turned into the street to walk back to their hotel. In deep distress, Paul couldn't restrain his tears either. As
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father and son tried to console each other, Paul suddenly heard someone whistling in the dark of night. They could not see any trace of the whistler, and the tune was indeed unlikely in an out-of-the-way street in Kobe in 1925 — "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
Paul and his father in their moment of extreme distress were immediately strengthened and uplifted by that song in the night.
And it proved to be a turning point in Seth, Jr.'s illness. He recovered and made the trip back to America on the ship with his family.
In a twist of events that Paul cannot fully comprehend, his brother died the next year, however, when gangrene complications followed an emergency appendectomy.
But even in this unexpected loss after the earlier healing in Japan, God's comfort was near and real to the Rees family. "The outpouring of love, letters, and the assurance of prayers by friends made us feel the Christian community was a larger family than we had thought," Paul recalls.
The third major crisis of faith came to Paul in Pasadena, California, when his second child was born. Paul and Edith P. Brown had been married in 1926, and their first child, Evelyn Joy, was born the next year. But Paul, Jr., their first son, born in 1933, lived less than thirty-six hours.
Paul well remembers breaking the word to Edith that the infant had expired. As Paul held Edith's hand, he sat on the edge of her hospital bed and they read from the Bible together.
As he relived that moment, Paul told me, "I can see tears rolling down her cheeks — she was not distraught; it was a mingling of peace and pain. It was a totally new experience for me as a man and as a father. She didn't make a big point out of the word 'why?' It was there, but it didn't become a kind of challenge to the Lord's oversight of our lives."
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The Reeses were blessed with two more children. Daniel Seth was born in 1935, and Julianna, in 1937.
MONEY IN SHORT SUPPLY
Though Paul and Edith can now afford two apartments, one in Boca Raton, Florida, where they spend the winters, and their summer apartment in Northbrook, Illinois, there were days during the Great Depression in the early 1930s when money was in very short supply.
At the time, Paul was engaged in itinerant evangelistic work, with Kansas City as home base. Offerings, Rees remembers, were very small. But that was all there was, and Paul and Edith were grateful for any money at all.
So, when a telegram came from northern New York where he was scheduled to preach a three-week crusade, canceling out at the last minute, Paul had reason to feel destitute. Time hung heavy, and there were bills to pay.
"For a few days I was depressed," Paul admitted.
But soon Paul remembered having spoken several years earlier at a church camp in Minnesota. The director, a Methodist pastor, had told Paul, "If you ever have a cancellation in your evangelism schedule, let me know."
Paul sent a telegram to the pastor of the Park Avenue Methodist Church in Minneapolis telling him that he did, indeed, have a cancellation. The dates were available, and the pastor asked Paul to preach in his church.
But Paul sees the evangelistic services as more than a way the Lord provided for the Rees's immediate financial needs. Some members of the First Covenant Church of Minneapolis were in the audience and were impressed with Paul's preaching.
They, too, stored up that knowledge for possible use later on. Several years later, when the church became immersed in problems of pastoral leadership, Rees was asked to supply the pulpit. He promised he could give
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them nine months of interim preaching.
It turned out to be twenty years, for he became pastor of the First Covenant Church of Minneapolis from 1938 to 1958.
Rees refers to that call that came to him as an example of the sufficiency God wants to give us when the going is tough.
"Jesus said, 'When the Holy Ghost comes, He will bring all things to your remembrance,' " Paul remembered. (See John 14:26 KJV). He went on to note that Jesus was speaking to His disciples, but that the truth of the passage is nevertheless applicable to present-day persons and circumstances. "The Holy Ghost caused me to remember during the Depression what Dr. George Vallentyne, the Methodist minister in Minneapolis, had said to me about letting him know if I had a speaking cancellation," Paul explained.
The fifth major testing of Paul's faith came in 1954 at the time when he was minister to ministers for the Billy Graham Crusades in London as he had also served for Graham Crusades in Scotland and Australia.
A well-known fundamentalist leader who had known Paul's father turned on Paul in a series of letters and peppered him with allegations that if he had had the guts that his father had, he would denounce Billy Graham.
The attack was a painful experience for Paul.
But the memory of how his father had withstood criticism and unwarranted hostility without rancor or retaliation was a soothing balm. "I was able to pray in love for my accuser," Rees said simply.
RESOURCES AVAILABLE TO CHRISTIANS
Continuing our conversation in Rees's motel room as he began preparing for a 7:30 A.M. breakfast meeting, Paul spoke of some of the resources available to Christians in time of testing and crisis.
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"It troubles me a bit that so many books and articles tend to minimize and underplay the emphasis on God's adequacy for tough testing times," he declared.
"There are resources — God is able to make all grace abound."
On the other hand, Rees stressed that, though the Christian shouldn't lose sight of what the grace of God can do, neither should he be unrealistic. "We are not living in a perpetual bubble bath of good feelings," he said, adding: "Yet, even when I'm conscious of having let the Lord down, there is always the feeling that this wasn't fate. There could have been a better reaction on my part than that."
To Rees, the concept of the victorious Christian life is not a neurotic emotionalism — a continual feeling of one's spiritual pulse, a nervous attempt to discover whether one has fallen below a self-set standard. Rather, the answer for the Christian is to keep immersing himself in the Scriptures. For, as he does that, Rees believes, he will keep discovering new insights and God's Word will become personally relevant, both for correction and for support.
Another resource called forth by Rees is an ongoing conversation between the Christian and the Holy Spirit. Frank Laubach of the World Literacy Crusade is Paul's model for this: "This naturalness with which this man conversed with the Holy Spirit is so down-to-earth. It's not eerie, weird, or put-on."
In his later years, Rees has become growingly dependent on the Christian community as a source of spiritual strength and help for day-to-day living.
Despite the disappointment of seeing his father embroiled in serious conflict with Christian leaders, and despite his own conflict with Christian leaders, and despite his own conflict with one, Paul was able to say with joy: "The closeness of my relationship to Christians I know well and who know me well has become a priceless thing. It provides a kind of base for strength to know that
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people really mean it when they say, 'There isn't a day that I don't pray for you.'
"This has a dual effect: It generates strength in me and it also makes me feel similarly responsible to pray for other members of the Christian community."
Paul, who celebrated with Edith their Golden Wedding anniversary in 1976, has now outlived all of those senior men of God who helped mold and mature him when he was a youthful preacher-in-the-making. He has outlived many of his peers and respected contemporaries. In light of a life spent serving Jesus Christ, Paul has distilled the essence of his strong and persistent convictions into ten points. These were reprinted in "Christian Education Trends," a monthly newsletter circulated privately to ministers and other Christian educators by the David C. Cook Publishing Co. in the spring of 1977:
1. I shall go to my grave affirming that Jesus Christ is what I mean by absolute reality. Not the church, which is less than eternal; not the Bible, which is instrumental rather than ultimate; but Jesus Christ, the Lord God revealed.2. I shall go to my grave convinced that the church — the visible community of Christian faith and fellowship — needs to exhibit a unity that is perilously contradicted by the exclusive, self-defensive, and often warring divisions into which we have fractured and factioned ourselves. With time's passing, I am less and less impressed by our attempts to justify this rabbit-warren proliferation of our sects and subdivisions. Concurrently, I am increasingly struck by the flimsiness and self-serving of our arguments for going on as we are.
3. I shall go to my grave declaring that the human condition of estrangement from God is so profound that it can never be put right except as God in mercy
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takes the initiative, as He has in Christ. At the Cross, the place of reconciliation has been found and founded, once-for-all and for all who will kneel to accept.
4. I shall go to my grave persuaded that rules and regulations for Christians, if used as means by which we pigeonhole our Christian comrades into "true" or "false," are legalistic devices for producing "cult" or "culture" Christianity instead of the Beloved Community of the New Testament.
5. I shall go to my grave firm in the feeling that one of the most frequent undetected sins of Christians is idolatry. Customs, tradition, forms, ideologies, organizations, institutions (including the State), precedents, structures, titles, cliches — in every one of them there is a potential idol. They arose, it well may be, out of historical necessity. We cling to them, or kowtow to them, or somehow perpetuate them, out of lethargy, or bigotry, or stupidity, or vanity.
6. I shall go to my grave believing that the long years of controversial "pulling and hauling" over the personal gospel vs. the social gospel was a poignant mis-calculation. There was myopia on both sides. Now, thank God, the signs point to clearer understanding.
7. I shall go to my grave with the conviction that theological "tunnel vision" has kept multitudes of Christians, both clergy and laity, from discovering the wealth of Christlikeness that is open to them on the pages of the New Testament. A holiness of motivating love, offered both as gift and as growth, has been missed by masses of Christians. They have missed it because of their preoccupation with two-nature theories, or "after-all-I'm-only-human" rationalizations, or mistaken exegeses ("Paul saw himself a bigger sinner at the end than at the beginning
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of his Christian life"), or justifiable fears of perfectionist excesses that they have witnessed or that history has recorded. We are wrong, I am persuaded, to set limits to what the grace of God can do in redeeming and refashioning the believing person.
8. I shall go to my grave asserting that nine-tenths of our either-or's are abstractions of the mind rather than reflections of reality. There are absolutes and there is truth in situation ethics. There is subordination in family and other community life and there is sexual equality. We do have a trustworthy Bible and we do have a Bible whose authority is not derailed by a misspelled word, or an erroneously translated term, or an incorrect date.
9. I shall go to my grave believing that, side by side with my ardent expectation of the Second Advent, most of our "signs of the times" sermons and books are based on opportunism and a mistaken understanding of what the apocalyptic portions of Scripture are meant to teach us. These hot sermonic and literary outpourings tend, in the cases of many Christians, to distract from the "occupy until I come" mandate for missions and social responsibility.
10. I shall go to my grave unshakable in the faith-confession that, all appearances to the contrary, "Jesus is Lord."
Thou, O Christ, art all I want.
More than all in Thee I find;
Raise the fallen, cheer the faint,
Heal the sick and lead the blind.
CHARLES WESLEY
