Ecumenism is so well established and the current merger scene so touchy that the Consultation on Church Union is something of a sacred cow. But COCU delegates will converge on Atlanta in March for the annual negotiation fest with a bracing criticism behind them.
General Secretary C. Thomas Spitz, Jr., told the Lutheran Council in the U. S. A. meeting in New York this month that COCU has “moved even farther away from confessional commitment,” making it “increasingly difficult for Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox or any of the other historic confessional communities to participate.”
Even COCU’s 1966 agreement on the Apostles’ Creed “as a corporate act of praise and allegiance which binds it to the Apostolic Gospel” was a little weak to confessionally bound Lutherans. And last year, Spitz reported, this commitment was “considerably watered down.” A 1968 COCU resolution, he noted, “recognized (1) the historically conditioned character of the Creeds, (2) the corporate character of the Christian Creeds, (3) the principle that the Creeds are for the guidance of the members of the church and are to be used persuasively but not coercively.
“It was made quite clear that the Creed should not even be spoken in a public worship service if speaking it would give offense to any parties in the United Church. The Creed would, in effect, become simply a reference document to which it would not be possible to make or require any kind of responsible commitment. The Creed would not be used as any kind of standard of judgment.”
Since Spitz led the council’s first official observers to COCU, the words carry much sting. Not that Lutherans haven’t been saying such things for years. But Spitz is the first major U. S. church figure to indict the direction of the talks, aimed at creating a Protestant church with 25 million members.
The Lutherans’ theological caution is probably the chief reason why they were not invited to join COCU until several years after negotiations began. Many feared Lutheran presence then would brake the ecumenical express, perhaps even derail it.
Because Spitz’s remarks this month are about as representative a Lutheran consensus as you could get, there seems no possibility that any of America’s nine million Lutherans will join the united church. The 25 million Baptists form the other big Protestant group outside.
Besides the big ecumenical picture, the Lutheran Council itself is in the midst of some interesting interchurch days, though you never would have known it from its droning New York meeting. The council has an annual budget of $2.2 million and is slowly assuming more joint functions for the three big U. S. denominations. But almost everything is in suspended animation pending Missouri Synod’s July vote on fellowship with the American Lutheran Church. How do you cooperate with somebody you can’t even preach or take communion with?
But all the potential is there for a parallel to the National Council of Churches, and already a question is being raised on how the eighty local inter-Lutheran councils that have sprung up will relate to the older city councils of churches.
An LC committee headed by University of Michigan law Professor Paul Kauper filed a sweeping statement on “the changing social order” that had an NCC ring to it. (A socio-economic situation may be “so unjust that revolution, in a literal sense, is called for,” though most churchmen doubt the United States needs one.)
Another paragraph was snipped out and pasted on an official council condemnation of racism: “The need in today’s crisis is that the Church must become directly and corporately involved in the social struggle at all levels from the parish to the church body.”
But the day before, Spitz had told the council that mere money or political pressure—while often necessary—was not the Church’s most strategic social contribution. In fact, it may be “abdicating the unique purpose of its ministry—to lead men to the full stature of Christ.” He advocates the less dramatic job of educating the laity, which often disagrees with church leaders on such matters as race.
BYPASSING RELIGIOUS BOOKS
Pity the poor religious publisher. In these days of secular Christianity, some religious journals even give more review space to non-religious books than to religious ones.
Vice-president Werner Linz of the Roman Catholic book house Herder and Herder raised the gripe at the recent meeting of the Religious Publishers Group of the American Book Publishers Council.
During a day devoted to book reviewing, with many editors in attendance, Linz said the poor religious book coverage (as the most notable exception he cited CHRISTIANITY TODAY) may be unfair both to readers and to the publishers who give many advertising dollars to the magazines. He based his comments on a survey of six months’ worth of the major religious periodicals.
A Post-Pike Era?
Forced into a showdown choice between Bishop C. Kilmer Myers and his predecessor, James A. Pike, the Episcopal Diocese of California convention this month opted for Myers. Delegates overwhelmingly tabled a Pike-garnished measure that would have rapped Myers’s condemnation of Pike’s third marriage (see January 17 issue, page 42).
The hotly debated motion said Myers’s pastoral letter asking a pulpit ban on Pike cast doubt on the validity of “hundreds of marriages performed in this diocese after a judgment on the basis of spiritual death, including a good many marriages of the clergy.”
A week before the convention, Pike had charged in a thirteen-page memorandum that Myers had agreed to marry him and writer Diane Kennedy, and had even moved the date up a day to November 14 to fit his calendar. But fifteen days later Myers reneged, said Pike, then failed to answer later communications except to note that Pike’s second marriage was indeed “spiritually dead.”
After the Pike paper was released, Myers asked Presiding Bishop John Hines for advice, then declined further comment. During his convention keynote speech, with Pike seated on the platform as a courtesy, Myers spoke of “the pain that recent variances with my brother Jim have visited upon me.”
After the strong vote and a standing ovation, Myers vowed he would continue to apply the same “basic theological approach to the canonical problem of marriage and remarriage as established in this diocese for some years. I have always tried to be a pastor, and I include among my objects of concern Jim and Diane Pike.”
Earlier, Pike won a voice and vote in the convention despite his resigned and non-resident status. He said the 1966 convention that elected Myers had given him these privileges, even though the action was somehow omitted from the official minutes. Confusion remains over whether the action this year applies to future conventions.
Money was another concern at the meeting. Unpaid pledges from the 130 Episcopal churches in the San Francisco area jumped several hundred per cent over the previous year. This year’s $838,162 budget, down $75,000 from 1968’s, calls for the suspension of a century-old newspaper, slashbacks in foreign-missions and other financing for the denomination, and virtual elimination of the social-relations, education, and stewardship departments.
Conservatives attribute the crisis to offbeat inner-city programs and such controversial clergy as Pike. Youthful, vocal lay delegate Richard Phenneger, for one, believed relief would come if the denomination were less involved in politics, more in “evangelism and the ministry of Christ.” But liberals blame inflation, general disillusionment with the institutional church, and “revenge” motives of tight-fisted conservatives.
Whether Myers can bring unity to his troubled see remains to be seen. One thing is now sure: he has a wider base of support than Pike did as bishop. And as a top diocesan staffer put it, “Bishop Myers has at least last emerged from the long shadow of his predecessor; a post-Pike era has dawned.”
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
A Wing And A Prayer
National Airlines Captain Harry L. Davis is not among the flock of pilots whose airplanes have been hijacked to Cuba. But he came within a prayer of it.
Before the dramatic February 3 turnabout, 18-year-old Michael A. Peparo of Cold Spring, New York, fidgeted with a knife, demanding that the pilot fly him to Cuba. With the hippie-type youth was another, looking just as disturbed.
Davis, an Episcopal layman in Miami, recalled: “We felt after talking with this youth we could get to him psychologically because of his sensitive nature. We discussed his family background, school, and then got into religion. It came out he had been brought up in the Catholic Church and had been an altar boy.”
Sensing the boy’s trouble, Davis reasoned with him that Christ had “more trouble than anybody.… He was hounded and wound up on the cross crucified.” Davis several times asked the youth to meditate, seeking guidance.
Davis, who described himself as “sort of half agnostic” before getting interested in a Bible-study group for pilots, said, “For the better part of an hour I felt I ought to go back and pray with him.”
Finally, he followed the urging. “I walked right up to him, reached for his hand (still holding the knife) and said, ‘Let’s pray together.’ He pulled his hand away a couple of times, but I finally held on to it, and we prayed a short prayer. He broke into tears.”
Davis continued: “I believe this was the turning point. He didn’t surrender or anything then, but it was obvious that he was wavering from then on.” Davis, feigning a fuel shortage, landed in Miami, and the boy was taken into custody. In Miami, Davis expressed relief that the “disturbed boy” was in the hands of a man concerned for his welfare.
ADON TAFT
Family Of Man Fuss
New York’s annual Family of Man banquet has proved an easy way to raise $200,000 or so for the city Protestant council by giving an award to such big-name speakers as John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Lester Pearson, Lyndon Johnson, Jean Monnet, and (last year) to John D. Rockefeller III.
But technically the money went to the “Society for the Family of Man, Inc.,” which underwent a board reshuffle last summer and appears to be headed toward the sort of non-sectarian humanitarianism that publicity has always implied.
Now the city church council is suing to get $185,000 in gifts to the 1968 banquet, plus $100,000 in punitive damages, from twenty-two bluebloods including department-store magnate Wheelock Bingham (Macy’s). But in a countersuit the twenty-two defendants charge the church council has wrongly used Family of Man money for itself. Defendant Arthur Atha said “absorption” of funds by the council “was threatening to become an open scandal.”
Project Indignity
Edgar H. S. Chandler, 63, has all the right credentials: ecumenist, civil-rights leader, foe of the Viet Nam war. But that didn’t stop shouting students from nine Chicago seminaries from disrupting this month’s banquet honoring him upon retirement as chief executive of the area church federation.
Larry Rosser, 24, a graduate student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, took over the podium to run a question-and-answer session on Project Equality, the selective buying pact to aid fair employment which the protesters were supporting. With headline speaker W. A. Visser’t Hooft agog, Rosser even stood on the head table for a couple of minutes.
Chandler gamely joined a picket line outside but later admitted he “could have cried” over the banquet break-up. He now moves to a similar church-council post in quieter Worcester, Massachusetts.
SOUTHERN PRESBYTERIAN CLIFFHANGER
Southern Presbyterians, with most of the voting already tallied by mid-February on merger with the 377,000-member Reformed Church in America, were little closer to knowing the outcome than when they started. In fact, with St. Louis Presbytery not due to vote until days before the April General Assembly, it might go down to the wire.
A negative vote in only twenty of the seventy-seven presbyteries would kill the merger. With sixty-three of the regional bodies voting, seventeen were opposed-three short of defeat-with forty-six in favor.
With so many cross-currents in the RCA plan, the presbytery voting showed no simple conservative-liberal breakdown. Most spokesmen for the presbyteries not yet reporting were closemouthed about which way they thought the vote would go.
The merger plan gives southern dissidents a chance to leave the denomination with their property. But it also includes a more centralized version of property ownership, and shifts the margin for ecumenical merger from the present stringent three-fourths of presbyteries to two-thirds of “vote units” within presbyteries.
Other crucial Presbyterian votes are on permission for union synods and union presbyteries with northern Presbyterians. The latest vote was thirty-two for the synod unification, thirty-eight against. On the presbytery issue it was thirty-three for, thirty-seven against. In each case it takes thirty-nine “no” votes to kill.
