Electronic Evangelist

When Lutherans of the Missouri Synod (5,000 churches, 2,000,000 members) decided to get into TV five years ago, controversy raged among the ministers over the best way to "merchandise" Christianity. The Rev. Herman W. Gockel, a religious counselor-by-mail for radio's popular Lutheran Hour, quoted St. Mark, who said that Jesus always drew on drama in His preachings: "Without a parable spake He not unto them." Since then, the Lutherans have produced more than 150 half-hour parables, distributed free weekly for showing on some 280 TV stations across the U.S. (sufficient to reach 98% of TV homes), 20 in Canada and 20 abroad. As This Is the Life* entered its sixth year of merchandising last week, it could lay claim to being the most widely televised show in broadcasting history.

The Great Unchurched. This Is the Life began in 1952 on six stations, and by the end of its first year was seen in 60 of the U.S.'s 67 TV cities. To assure professional polish, enterprising Lutherans hired an ad agency, some high-priced Hollywood scriptwriters and actors. As .its director it chose Dr. Gockel, who had given up his pastorate in Evansville, Ind. after suffering a psychosomatic paralysis of the vocal cords caused by a deepseated; fear that he was "not reaching his people.

Aware that 65 million Americans had no professed church affiliation, Dr. Gockel aimed his nonsectarian show at "the great unchurched--they are our potential customers." The first shows were a serialized morality play about Druggist Carl Fisher of Middleburg, U.S.A., a sort of male Ma Perkins whose soda-fountain stools spun with ordinary people with ordinary problems. After 3 1/2 years the synod elders decided that the Fisher family had come to be simply "busybodies snooping around the neighborhood hunting for something to stick their noses into." So Life abandoned the Fisher pharmacy for separate, self-contained dramatizations of modern social problems--how a family reacts when polio strikes, how a man adjusts to blindness, the dilemmas of old age.

Meet the Pagan. Filmed in Hollywood at an annual cost of $750,000, Life begins each shooting session with a silent prayer. The primary purpose of each episode, says Dr. Gockel, is "to acquaint the public with the way of salvation, and that is only through repentance for sin and faith in Christ." After an actress approached him on the set with "What's this 'Jesus died for us' routine?", Dr. Gockel became even more convinced of the need to reach the nation's "unchurched," introduced a TV technique of "new and fresh phraseology" to express old and never-changing truths.

When a minister explains the meaning of atonement. Life has its sinner respond: "You mean that Christ took the rap for me?" Explains Dr. Gockel: "You have to meet the pagan where he is." Dr. Gockel allows none of his characters except the fallen to smoke, drink, or dance too close. (His definition of too close: "without space showing between the two bodies.") "But we never preach," he says. "We simply let the value of the Christian message demonstrate itself."

* No kin to Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life.

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