Notable deaths: Religion

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, December 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: notable deaths.

Today, we continue our recap of those who were widely known or who exerted great influence—especially in the church or in society as religious leaders. People like Albert Nolan, a South African Catholic priest who fought for human rights and democracy. Or Christian activist known as “Brother Andrew” who smuggled Bibles into communist Poland.

REICHARD: Here’s Harrison Watters, our WORLD Radio production assistant, with a few more.

HARRISON WATTERS: Duane King was serving as a Nebraska pastor when he met a deaf couple who told him that they didn’t get anything out of church.

KING: All of a sudden my mind was whirring with ‘Of course they can’t, and there must be other people like that, it just struck me. And what I wrote next he says was a God thing, because I wrote, ‘if you come to church I’ll learn sign language.’

King’s promise led him and his wife to found Deaf Ministries and plant a church for the deaf in 1970. Nine years later, King began producing devotional videos sharing the gospel. Here is a video from 1979 where King visits Jerusalem to tell the story of Jesus in sign language.

CLIP: I looked, I saw with my own eyes and Jesus is not in his grave.

In 2020, Deaf Ministries completed an even more audacious project—the first translation of the Bible by the deaf for the deaf. It took 38 years and 53 translators to film Genesis through Revelation in American Sign Language.

CLIP: We’ve seen a lot of change in many deaf people because they’re seeing the Bible in their own heart language.

King died in January at age 84.

From evangelizing the deaf to evangelizing musicians.

MOHR: After I had been a musician, I had to give it up. And then I became a concert piano tuner.

German Franz Mohr grew up in a Christian home that loved music. As a young violinist during World War II, Mohr was so disturbed by the destruction and death that he considered committing suicide. Instead, he prayed to the God of his parents and became a Christian. Mohr soon found his life’s work in tuning pianos for Steinway and Sons in America.

CLIP: Creating the perfect sound has been a lifetime of passion for Franz Mohr, that master piano tuner whom the great pianists like Horowitz Rubinstein and Clyburn would not play without.

Audio here from Crescendo International. As a Christian who’d found new life, Mohr sought to share his joy with the concert musicians as he tuned their pianos.

MOHR: We need a reference point in the music world to determine our concert pitch and this is the tuning fork. And so in our spiritual life we might feel that we are right in our opinion about God and spiritual things, unless we have the Bible we have no reference point.

Mohr served with Crescendo, the musical arm of Campus Crusade for Christ—or Cru—for more than 20 years. He died at his New York home in March at age 94.

Next, the wife of a philosopher who made her own mark defending objective truth.

Alice (Von Hildebrand) Jourdain was born and raised by Catholic parents in Belgium. When the Germans invaded in 1940, Alice emigrated to the United States. She studied philosophy at Fordham University and earned her doctorate in 1949.

Ten years later, Alice married Catholic philosopher and theologian Dietrich Von Hildebrand.

HILDEBRAND: It was truly you know a communion. We agreed on everything that mattered.

Alice Von Hildebrand assisted her husband in his work while pursuing her own career as a Catholic professor teaching at the secular Hunter College in New York. There, she sought to win students over through her commitment to objective truth.

Hildebrand: I felt absolutely like a fish out of water. No, for some reason God wanted me there and even though subjectively when I left the classroom I said “you’re a failure,” students were responsive to me.

After her husband’s death in 1977, Von Hildebrand carried on his work defending the “inviolable mystery of the person” in the face of increasingly dehumanizing philosophies.

HILDEBRAND: The greatest illusion is to believe that human laws can make the world perfect. The only thing that can make the world perfect is a change of heart, the purification through revelation

Von Hildebrand died in her New York home in January. She was 98.

The most arrested rabbi in America also died this year.

Israel Dresner was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home in New York City. As a young man, he was passionate about fighting for civil rights and became a rabbi in the progressive Reform branch of Judaism.

In the 60s, Dresner joined Martin Luther King Jr. in the first of the Freedom Rides. Here he is in a 2011 American Experience documentary.

DRESNER: We started out with 14 Protestant ministers, eight white and six black and four Reform rabbis, and we wound up with ten of us getting arrested.

Over the course of the movement, Dresner landed in jail four times. But he said that his sacrifice paid off when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in August 1965.

As a lifelong advocate for various minority groups, Dresner saw his legacy as being a rabbi who helped others.

DRESNER: Well, I want to be remembered as somebody who not only tried to keep the Jewish faith but also to invoke the Jewish doctrine from the Talmud which is called Tikkun Olam - Repairing the world, and I hope that i made a little bit of a contribution to making the world a little better place.

Dresner was diagnosed with colon cancer in December 2021 and died less than a month later in a senior living center in New Jersey. He was 92.

Next, two British ministers who pursued two different visions of church.

Stuart Briscoe grew up walking past an Anglican church to attend a nonconformist congregation in England’s Lake District. He preached his first sermon at age 17 and was afraid of running out of material. But when he looked up at the clock after making his first point, he saw that he’d actually gone over time…with two points still to go.

CLIP: I had no idea what to do but I blurted out the only thing that came into my mind: I'm terribly sorry, I don't know how to stop and a very helpful gentleman sitting on the back row gave me my first lesson in preaching. he said shut up and sit down.

Thankfully, he didn’t stay sitting down.

As a member of the Torchbearers, Briscoe was soon speaking and preaching across the globe. In 1971, a friend pointed out that the Apostle Paul wrote letters to specific churches, and so Briscoe should consider being a pastor rooted in a local church.

Soon afterwards, a non-conformist church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin surprised Briscoe with an invitation to be their pastor. With Elmbrook Church now as his home congregation, Briscoe split his time between shepherding his members and preaching to people across the country through his radio and TV organization, Telling the Truth Ministries.

Telling the Truth Ministries: The Greek word translated church is Ekklesia. It comes from two Greek words – Ek which means ‘out of,’ and Klerao, which means ‘to call.’ So you put the two together, and the Ekklesia is the “called out ones,” “the called out people.”

Briscoe retired in 2001 and continued telling the truth about Jesus until he died in August. He was 91.

Back to England, one of the pioneers of the New Church Movement died in April at age 78.

Gerald Coates came from a nominal Anglican family in Great Britain. As a young adult, he experienced conversion and pursued baptism and membership with the Plymouth Brethren. Coates soon felt bound by the strict principles that organized the church. But then he had an experience that changed his life.

COATES: There's no Pentecostal church around our place and the charismatic movement I knew nothing about it. So one day I'm just on my bicycle singing away as often used to and suddenly I'm singing in a language I've never heard before. And I’m thinking, what on earth is this?

Coates’ charismatic gift of tongues was not welcomed by the Plymouth Brethren, who eventually barred him and his wife from attending services. With no other evangelical churches around to join, Coates started his own church. That sparked a movement which now has networks of home churches all around the world.

COATES: So the whole church has changed from within, and it's just been here very very humbling to know that you've played some very tiny part – Nicky Gumbel said had it not been for the house Church is the new church we were there wouldn't have been an alpha because I think we cut our way through a lot of theological jungle ecclesiological junk all the way we do church.

Speaking of the way we do church, a pioneer in urban ministry also died this year.

During the tumultuous 1960s, Ray Bakke moved his family into Chicago in 1965 after feeling a call to follow the Great Commission into the city. Their ministry soon became much more concrete than they expected.

BAKKE: 34 years ago our oldest son Woody brought home his friend from school and we fed Brian for about six months. Then we realized he was homeless, so we talked it over and I went to court and paid eighty dollars and adopted a kid named Brian. I already had a kid named Brian so I got two boys named Brian. It’s not hard to tell them apart: one is very blonde the other is very black.

Bakke was originally from rural Washington state, but attending Moody Bible Institute in the 50s opened his eyes to the racial divisions and poverty that infected cities. As fellow Evangelicals left Chicago to escape the violence of race riots, Bakke realized that the church was missing something.

BAKKE: At that point I realized the church had no theology of the city. Neither did I. I am proof that you can read the bible in hebrew and greek and not know what the bible says about cities.

Bakke’s journey to organize a theology of cities led him to co-found Bakke Graduate University in 2001 to train urban Christian ministers.

BAKKE: It's not enough to minister in the city. We also have to minister to the city. The city is being called upon to be the catch basin of the nations now, so we have to have a much bigger view. We need the whole range of all the disciplines in the kingdom of God. It's not just about pastors and evangelists anymore that's i think the distinction of urban ministry.

Bakke died in February. He was 83.

We end today with a bestselling novelist who found God through laughter.

Frederick Beuchner came from a family with no church affiliation. After studying English at Princeton, Beuchner wrote the best-selling novel A Long Day’s Dying. One Sunday, with nothing else to do, Beuchner went to the church next door. There, he heard a sermon on Jesus in the wilderness that changed his life.

BEUCHNER: He said, Christ is crowned in the hearts of those who love him or believed in him amidst confession and tears and great laughter. And I was so taken aback by great laughter that I just I found the tears springing from my eyes.

Beuchner went on to become an evangelist in the mainline Presbyterian church of America. He wrote 39 books across genres of theology, fiction, and memoir that inspired people across theological and political boundaries. Like C.S. Lewis, Beuchner addressed a wide variety of topics, including pain and death. Here he is in a 1991 sermon on stewarding pain.

BEUCHNER: And remember the cross, because it seems to me that the cross of Christ in a way speaks somewhat like this same word saying that out of that greatest pain endured in love and faithfulness comes the greatest beauty and our greatest hope.

Beuchner died in his sleep in August. He was 96.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters

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