By high-church standards, last month’s General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church (or, if you now prefer, The Episcopal Church) at Seattle was a swinging affair. The ten-day meeting was the shortest in years but crammed with more business and debatable issues than ever—so much, in fact, that some housekeeping was postponed to a special session in 1969.
Arguments and significant actions concerned everything from church unity and evangelism to war and sacking of bishops. And there was enough to make everybody happy about something.
Presiding Bishop John E. Hines, chairing his first convention, got the budget he wanted and, with minor lumps, his “urban crisis fund” of $3 million a year, which includes $1 million from the church women. United Presbyterians plan a similar fund. After a long struggle and with a big assist from the clergy, women were granted the right to sit as lay deputies (delegates) beginning in 1973.
The youth of the church were heard in John Dillon, national Episcopal youth president. He urged the church to provide leadership in the “great moral issues of the day.” He warned against the “moral idiocy” of both extremes in the Viet Nam dispute, though he pleaded for a strong statement. The bishops and deputies later debated hotly a statement on Viet Nam and adopted a watered-down “dove” stance, containing the usual pleas for peace. Twenty-one bishops called separately for a bombing halt.
The youth were seen, too: young nuns in garb strumming guitars while staging “happenings,” peaceniks distributing handbills, hippies admiring the clerical garb of high-order monks and nuns, ordained beatnik types in clergy dress replete with bells and beads debating fundamentalist pickets, and the straight types seriously taking notes in the visitors’ galleries. Buttons were in abundance: “Wise Up O Men of God” (a special order for the convention), and “Write Your Theology Here” (followed by a small square).
The real “action,” of course, was inside (the 157 bishops in the Playhouse, the 678 deputies in the Arena).
Both Bishop James A. Pike and the House of Bishops seemed pleased—though perhaps with some reservations on both sides—about their carefully lubricated compromise that rid them of their heresy hang-up (see story, page 44). It now will take charges from ten bishops and consent of two-thirds of the House of Bishops to start a heresy trial.
Through amendments, the Consultation on Church Union was made palatable to the high-church faction, which would prefer first-line talks with Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans. Most of the debate and word changes occurred in the House of Bishops. Bishop Robert Gibson, Jr., of Virginia, head of the Ecumenical Relations Commission and former head of COCU, assured his colleagues that participation in COCU did not commit the church to any final agreement. An amendment was passed making vote by the convention mandatory before anything beyond talking takes place. A section was added calling for the Episcopal Church to talk with non-COCU groups.
The bishops and deputies did commend COCU’s “Principles of Church Union” as a “significant advance” in “certain matters” that have “long divided Christians.” The final wording passed overwhelmingly in both houses and, surprisingly, with little debate in the House of Deputies. Two delegations, instructed by their dioceses to vote against COCU, said they could now vote affirmatively because of the “safeguards.” Montana Bishop Chandler Sterling, head of the high-church American Church Union which lobbied against COCU participation, said the vote was as he had expected but predicted the COCU goal will never be achieved. “There are too many fundamental differences,” he said. Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, in addressing the convention, hoped aloud that the COCU section on the episcopate would be rewritten to make it more Anglican in viewpoint.
In a crowded press conference Ramsey fielded questions on such other subjects as Viet Nam (he wants the war to end quickly), Pike’s books (“superficial”), and the recent Billy Graham crusade in England (“There have been converts and many people have been helped, but the crusades have not altered the religious situation in England very much.”)
He predicted a world church in the “distant future” with “little formal organization, a variety of customs and rituals and national expressions but in which there would be agreement in the essentials of doctrine and in the sharing of the same sacraments and ordained ministry.” He even allowed for the possibility that the pope would be some sort of presiding bishop, but he warned against giving too much power to any central bureaucracy.
A number of bishops and deputies said in interviews that the emerging issue in their church is evangelism. Until action in Seattle, the Episcopalians, along with Unitarians and Greek Orthodox, had no national department of evangelism. Sterling, like others, believes the church will soon become disillusioned with its “sociological kick,” with a resultant boom in “personal religious life” and the “communication of the good news to persons outside the church.”
In Deputy deliberations, the Committee on the State of the Church and the Committee on Evangelism talked the same language: The church was in deep trouble theologically, financially, and spiritually. Some members expressed resentment of the church’s “preoccupation with fringe groups.” The State of the Church Committee went so far as to express from the platform its alarm at the “distressing situation.” The report was front-page material for both convention dailies.
A report to the House of Bishops described what evangelism is not. “It is not basically the teaching of Christian faith and life, principles of social and moral responsibilities, stewardship, world mission, recruitment to membership. Evangelism is personal human commitment to Jesus Christ and witnessing to other persons about Christ and his power,” the spokesman said.
In other action, the convention:
• Adopted a $14.6 million budget for 1968, a 10 per cent increase, with even higher budgets for 1969 and 1970.
• Created a Board for Theological Education.
• Made provision for lay administration of the Chalice, and approved three-year trial use of a revised liturgy.
• Elected Dean John B. Coburn of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as president of the House of Deputies.
• Amended the original resolution on abortion so it would condemn “abortions of convenience.”
THE ‘SELMA OF THE NORTH’
The Rev. James Groppi, known to Milwaukee’s Negroes as “Ajax, the White Knight,” has become the foaming cleanser with the agitating action. The militant, new-breed white priest has marched his way into national civil-rights prominence (See Sept. 29 issue, page 26).
With each daily march, more religious leaders, representing virtually all major churches, swing into line behind the fervent, messianic-minded man whose strategy matches the non-violence of Martin Luther King’s “We Shall Overcome” but whose philosophy more nearly resembles the black-power militancy of H. Rap Brown.
Groppi’s insistence on tension tactics until open housing is won has split Milwaukee’s Catholics. But the Senate of Priests of his diocese has supported him and the housing bill. The movement picked up momentum when district leaders of the three major Lutheran denominations backed lawful open-housing demonstrations.
While in Washington, D.C., to testify before the President’s Commission on Civil Disorder, Groppi—flanked by two husky youth commandos of the NAACP—called on the Johnson administration to cut off federal funds to cities that promote segregation.
Later, in a news conference held in the Rev. Edward Bauman’s historic Foundry Methodist Church in an integrated section of the capital, Groppi said he had no doubt Jesus would be marching with him. “Every march is a prayer,” the wiry priest affirmed, drawing nervously on a cigarette.
Wisconsin Methodist Bishop Ralph T. Alton, National Council of Churches representatives, and churchmen of varying stripe and hue swelled the ranks of activists hustling to the “Selma of the North.” Milwaukee, a city of 750,000 persons, 10 per cent of whom are Negro, meanwhile continued to teeter on the edge of violence.
Father Groppi’s message is that the thin cords restraining the black community and its sympathizers from open violence are about to snap.
The pugnacious priest told newsmen: “If we keep coming home with an empty bag, well …” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.
RUSSELL CHANDLER
N.C.C.: NEW DOLLAR DYNAMIC
“It’s time to put our money where our mouth is,” said Treasurer David B. Cassat of the National Council of Churches. A resolution adopted by the NCC General Board in Atlanta last month asserted:
“Christians cannot be content with words; they must back their words with money.”
Nothing new about that. But for the U. S. ecclesiastical elite it seems a big discovery. Sudden interest in finance as a social lever dominated the two-day General Board meeting. The board suspended standing rules to create a special five-member investment committee with power to divert at least 10 per cent of “unrestricted capital funds” into ghetto development.
The Washington Post’s William MacKaye said similar efforts by denominations aim to donate money to Black Power groups in major cities “virtually without strings attached.”
How much of the NCC’s $25 million annual budget will go to the ghettoes once initial enthusiasm wears off is anyone’s guess. With designated contributions increasing, the “unrestricted” NCC funds are a fading asset. The NCC again this year must borrow to meet operating expenses. At first, the board ordered only “high risk” ghetto investments, but this requirement was made optional the next day as the NCC cast a wistful eye on federally insured investments.
Also before the board was a proposed policy statement sanctioning economic boycott “to secure justice.” Lawyer William P. Thompson, United Presbyterian stated clerk and a member of the General Board, pointed out that the statement, if it urged member denominations to boycott, might run afoul of the Sherman Antitrust Act, which prohibits combinations in restraint of trade. The board voted to ask a reaction from NCC communions before it decides.
A report to the board brought out the fact that last December’s NCC General Assembly, held in Miami Beach at an estimated cost of $450,000, has proved to be an embarrassment. “There was for many in attendance something rather incongruous about meeting in luxurious surroundings to discuss the plight of victims of poverty,” the report said.
NCC officials insist, meanwhile, that income is insufficient to cover the $35,000 required annually to publish the Religion in Communist Dominated Areas newsletter. Accordingly, Managing Editor Blahoslav Hruby’s salary was slashed in half this past summer when he refused a purportedly temporary offer of an additional part-time position to take up the slack. After a bit of a hassle on financing, the board reaffirmed, in a unanimous voice vote, a June resolution to continue publication. RCDA’s future is still bleak, however, without outside financial support.
Between budgetary battles, the 147 board members (out of 257 eligible) who registered for the Atlanta meeting expressed support of open-housing ordinances in Milwaukee and elsewhere but stopped short of endorsing the militant priest James Groppi. They also urged a halt to the bombing of North Viet Nam and an appeal to the United Nations or some “other international agency” to take up the question of possible steps toward peaceful settlement of the war. Another resolution commenting on current public-assistance bills before Congress detected adverse attitudes toward the poor. A policy statement urged legislation to curtail severely the sale and possession of firearms.
RITES MAKE WRONG
The worship mood was “early Christian.” The congregation, mostly young Roman Catholic adults, encircled a second-floor apartment living room in Highland Park, New Jersey. A Rutgers University student distributed sixteen crystal glasses carefully filled with St. Emilion 1959 while another passed a wooden tray containing quartered slices of whole wheat bread. The celebrant, an ebullient 40-year-old priest with neatly combed black hair, explained that the rite was not the means by which forgiveness was granted but rather the “celebration of the fact that we are already forgiven through Christ.”
The sins of the Rev. George Hafner’s flock—who have been attending the impromptu Masses embellished with guitar-accompanied folk songs and free prayer—may be forgiven, but Hafner apparently is not. His diocese has suspended the priest, who until recently was assistant at St. James Church in nearby Jamesburg.
Being stripped of authority to offer Mass and hear confessions—and threatened with excommunication if he does not repent—bothered the determined clergyman not at all. He responded by blasting his church for “narrow thinking” and told his bishop, “You can’t cut us off from God.” The unusual services, kept “underground” for a year, are part of the Christian Laymen’s Experimental Organization in the Diocese of Trenton.
School-Aid Tactics
New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who is getting increasing attention as a dark-horse candidate for president, said he would support repeal of the present state constitution’s ban on state aid to church schools.
But Rockefeller had a condition: the Constitutional Convention must let New Yorkers decide separately on the school-aid question when they vote next month on a new state constitution. But the convention didn’t split the issues on the ballot, meaning Protestants and Jews who oppose such aid must vote down the entire constitutional reform.
Under deadline pressure, the convention passed a ban on state funds for “general academic buildings for non-public elementary and secondary schools.”
In predominantly Roman Catholic Rhode Island, the Superior Court ruled unconstitutional a 1963 law requiring cities to lend science, mathematics, and language texts to private-school students. The attorney general plans to aid an appeal to the state Supreme Court.
Another free-wheeling group of Catholics who call themselves “The People” was reprimanded by Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, D. C., for “borrowing chapels” in the capital area for “roving Masses.” The cardinal also censured the group, said to number more than 400 persons, for using drums and electronic instruments.
Informal house meetings are symbolic of a rising tide of liturgical renewal in which the Catholic Church is awash. Groups of all sorts and sizes, searching for more personal religion, are springing up spontaneously, often unknown to one another. Evidence of the strength of the movement was seen at the recent National Liturgical Conference in Kansas City, which was attended by 11,000 persons.
“Which will it be, anarchy or approval?” asked delegates, pointing to a critical junction in liturgical renewal. Will new forms be developed with the bishops’ approval and blessing or as “liturgical undergrounds,” illegal and unauthorized experiments that could produce “liturgical anarchy” in worship? Even church officials who warn against clandestine experimentation see liturgical reform in the small, worshiping community as a movement whose time has come. The thaw of frozen ritual quickened when Vatican II authorized a simplified Mass.
Last June U. S. bishops submitted an English translation of the Canon of the Mass to the Vatican, but by the end of last month approval had not been granted. Insiders believe snags have developed. But in Canada, bishops authorized interim translations in English and French for the Mass, beginning October 1.
In an unprecedented move at the liturgy conference, the Rev. David Bowman, the first Catholic priest on the staff of the National Council of Churches, asked U. S. religious leaders to permit intercommunion among all Christians during next year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. The board approved, 18 to 1.
Curiously, some Protestants—particularly Presbyterians—appear to be moving toward Roman worship characteristics. Yale’s theologian Roland Bainton, a leading church historian, notes many Presbyterian ministers now turn their backs on the congregations, some churches of the Calvinist tradition are installing crucifixes, and some choirs sing entire hymns in Latin.
Hafner’s liturgical mutations in New Jersey bumped against opposition from his superior, Bishop George Ahr, who threatened him with excommunication for inciting “scandal and schism.”
After thirteen years at St. James, Hafner resigned to take a part-time job as an anti-poverty worker. The rebel priest says he feels “impelled by the Spirit of Jesus” to continue impromptu Masses—with or without the hierarchy’s consent.
RUSSELL CHANDLER
MISSIONS: MOTHBALLS OR MANDATE?
Roman Catholic missionaries should pack up their bags, dismantle the missions structure, and start “humanizing” mankind through secular evolution. The era of the foreign missionary is gone forever. Missionary, go home!
Such were the themes of a Catholic University missions expert who addressed 1,000 delegates representing more than 200 American Catholic mission-sending societies during the Mission Secretariat’s meeting in Washington, D. C., last month.
But the Rev. Ronan Hoffman, associate professor of missiology, hardly had popped the upsetting words before another speaker sharply disagreed and championed a more traditional view of Roman evangelism.
“The Christian missionary effort should not be dismantled but greatly intensified … to assist in the conversion of men to God in Christ and to gather them together into the one Church.” So said Catholic convert Avery Dulles, professor of systematic theology at Woodstock (Maryland) College and son of the late Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
The debate sounded curiously like the current forensics among Protestants: What is evangelism? Is everything the Church does, per se, evangelism?
Hoffman apparently thinks so. In suggesting that the traditional goals of the missionary movement are passé, he called for the laity, rather than religious missionaries and clerics, to assume an ever-increasing missionary role. But the mission, he said, is the evolution of human society. That makes evangelization—including propagating the faith, converting pagans, and bringing the benefits of Christianity to a non-Christian culture—not only unnecessary but actually undesirable.
In turn, Dulles pointed out huge areas of the globe where the Gospel has not yet penetrated. And although he agreed with his colleague that “ours is a revolutionary era,” he cautioned, “I should be very much afraid of any revolution which attempted to achieve the true good of humanity apart from the knowledge and love of God in Jesus Christ.”
BALANCED BAPTISTS
The Progressive National Baptist Convention, a Negro group that held its sixth annual meeting in Cincinnati last month, has seemingly hit that delicate balance between the personal demands of the Gospel and the Christian’s responsibility to society.
The convention included a workshop on civil rights and an anti-Viet Nam address by the PNBC’s best-known pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But it ended with a foreign-missions rally at Zion Baptist Church in the predominantly Negro community of Avondale, scene of the summer’s race riots. Some $14,000 was raised for missionaries. And the convention voted to participate with Southern Baptists and others in the Crusade of the Americas evangelistic drive, a step the American Baptist Convention is unwilling to take.
Zion Church’s Rev. L. Venchael Booth was one of the leaders in pulling the Progressive Convention out of the huge, socially conservative National Baptist Convention, Inc. The soft-spoken Booth, now executive secretary of the 516,400-member denomination, says his group left the NBC because “we wanted to be cause-centered rather than political. We wanted to take away the lure of church office.”
Booth, called an “Uncle Tom” by Cincinnati Negro militants, said Progressive churches are “evangelistic with a social emphasis—as could be expected of a minority group. We believe you begin with individual salvation and then show that salvation has taken place in group activities.” He says he preaches for decisions in his church.
JAMES L. ADAMS
