Some Evangelicals Unconvinced by Clinton Contrition

President Clinton, speaking Thursday (August 10) at length and frankly about his spiritual life before and after his well-publicized sex scandal, had a tough audience for his soulful revelations.

Some of the evangelical leaders gathered at Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago had criticized the decision to include the president on the agenda at a leadership summit designed to encourage them in their work. Yet Clinton turned the group into a collective confessor of sorts.

"I'm now in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life from a terrible mistake I made," he said in response to questions from his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Bill Hybels, at Hybels' megachurch in South Barrington, Ill. "I realized once you've actually had to stand up and ask for forgiveness before the whole wide world, it makes it a little harder to be as hard as I think I once was on other people."

The audience gave him a standing ovation at the close of the onstage interview.

But his comments at the gathering sponsored by the Willow Creek Association, an organization that provides training and resources to churches, drew mixed reaction.

Despite the applause, some who weren't there say the president has not done enough to atone for his sins.

"The Hybels-Willow Creek appearance could not be called a repentance session," said the Rev. Jerry Falwell, chancellor of Liberty University and pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va.

"If your sin is public, your confession should be public. If you violated Gennifer Flowers or Monica Lewinsky or Kathleen Willey in any way, do as public an apology as they were publicly offended. That has never happened and I don't think it ever will."

Falwell said he was skeptical of the timing of the remarks, just days before Vice President Gore would be named the Democratic nominee for president. He said he recently predicted that "Mr. Clinton will out-repent Jimmy Swaggart" before the Democratic National Convention heard Gore's acceptance speech.

Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, agreed that Clinton still has not said enough.

"As far as I'm concerned, he has not sufficiently apologized to the American people for both his actions and his lying about it," Land said.

Hybels, on the other hand, said Clinton was so candid that skeptics who did not hear the president themselves should try to get their hands on a recording of the event.

"After hearing the president today, it is crystal clear he has asked for forgiveness for his mistakes and is on a journey of spiritual restoration and growth," Hybels said in a statement issued Friday.

The Rev. Gordon MacDonald, a New Hampshire-based writer and speaker who continues to meet regularly with Clinton along with two other spiritual advisers, said the president's comments were similar to those he has had in his private discussions.

"The president's remarks [Thursday] were thoroughly consistent with everything we have known about him during the past two years," MacDonald said in a written response to questions from Religion News Service. "There were no surprises in anything he said."

Clinton said his meetings with Hybels and the sessions he's had for the last two years with MacDonald; the Rev. Philip Wogaman, a United Methodist pastor in Washington; and the Rev. Tony Campolo, an evangelical leader based in St. Davids, Pa., "really kind of keeps me anchored."

Leaders of the Willow Creek Association felt the need to explain before the event why they let the president speak at the evangelical summit.

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