Manifest(o) Destiny: IFCO and the Churches

What is the relation between the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization, militant James Forman and agencies of thirteen major religious bodies? That’s what many people were asking last month in light of Forman’s demands for $500 million in “reparations” from churches and synagogues and his appearance at several national church conventions.

Forman’s “Black Manifesto” was adopted by the National Black Economic Development Conference (see May 23 issue, page 29), and supported in principle by IFCO’s board of directors at a subsequent meeting, although Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, IFCO president, later denied they did this. IFCO executive director Lucius Walker said IFCO did support it, and IFCO public-relations director Kay Longcope confirmed this to CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

IFCO is a coalition of twenty-three¹ organizations and acts as a clearing house to channel church money to community-organization work. IFCO budgeted $50,000 to sponsor the NBEDC, which adopted Forman’s manifesto, but the two organizations are structurally independent, according to both.

IFCO, though in an “internal crisis” over its relation to the manifesto, nevertheless officially has urged the churches to provide approximately $270,000 to launch the basic program asked for in the manifesto.

IFCO recently has come under fire from, among others, Los Angeles police sergeant Robert Thoms, who claims IFCO has given money to organizations involved in “militant and disruptive” activities, including at least one group in New Jersey allegedly led by the Black Panthers.

Miss Longcope acknowledged the tie to the Panthers, and Walker, when asked whether IFCO money was going to disruptive black militants, replied: “I hope this is the case.”

The latest published record of IFCO grants lists fifty-six groups that have received $1.5 million. IFCO was developed in 1967 by liberal churchmen to skirt conservative opposition to the channeling of money to militant poor people seeking economic and political power.

Walker said no notice had been received of a federal investigation of IFCO threatened by Thoms. Walker called the criticism and investigation “McCarthyite tactics” and a “smear campaign.”

United Presbyterian national-missions secretary Kenneth G. Neigh (asked by Forman to resign; Forman later rescinded the request at the UP General Assembly) found it necessary to write a special letter to all UPUSA ministers explaining the relation between IFCO and the denomination. Among other disclaimers, Neigh noted it should “be stressed that IFCO’s connection to Mr. Forman is non-existent as far as responsibility or support is concerned.…” However, the letter neglected to mention that IFCO had funded the NBEDC ($50,000) and had voted to solicit $270,000 from member churches to implement Forman’s manifesto.

Later, while militants occupied Neigh’s New York office, delegates at the UPUSA General Assembly in San Antonio wildly applauded a speech by Forman. He asserted that there was “a certain amount of bureaucratic involvement in the letter that went out from Dr. Neigh.”

Neigh’s letter also didn’t say that his board had allocated $180,000 to IFCO last winter for 1969 projects, including $50,000 for Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation community-organization training program, and the same amount for undesignated projects. UPUSA spokesmen then said that after 1969 all their community-organization money would go through IFCO and be undesignated.

Manifesto Maker

James Forman, militant spokesman for the newly formed National Black Economic Development Conference and leader of its United Black Appeal, suddenly leaped on stage as a key formulator of the new anti-church revolution when he presented—and got passed—his now widely discussed “Black Manifesto.”

Largely unknown except in the militant Southern civil-rights movement until the manifesto was adopted at a Detroit conference last month, the 40-year-old “liberation” strategist worked quietly for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee as its first executive director. He held this position for six years, beginning in 1961. He was the major political philosopher for the militant wing of the movement.

A large man with streaks of gray hair and a beard, Forman is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago. He spent four years in the Air Force and did graduate work in African affairs at Boston University. He has given strong backing to “third world liberation struggles” and believes the economic problems of black people—and depressed whites—will not be solved “unless there’s a revolution that takes money away from the few rich whites who run this country.”

Here are Forman’s reported comments on several topics:

Capitalism: Advocates of black capitalism are “black-power pimps and fraudulent leaders.… Any black man who is advocating a perpetuation of capitalism inside the United States is, in fact, seeking not only his ultimate destruction and death but is contributing to the continuous exploitation of black people all around the world.”

Racism: “So pervasive is the mentality of whites that only an armed, well-disciplined, black-controlled government can ensure the stamping out of racism in this country.… We say … think in terms of total control of the United States.”

Christianity: “One of the greatest techniques of control in keeping people in line and obedient to the power structure.…”

‘A Militant With Love’

American Baptist Convention president Thomas Kilgore Jr., 56, is pastor of the large Second Baptist Church in the Watts area of Los Angeles. A long-time civil-rights activist and former executive of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he helped to organize the 1963 march on Washington, D. C. He was a main speaker at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The affable cleric, a graduate of Moorehouse College and Union Theological Seminary, hints that his theology is somewhat more conservative than his politics. But he insists that he is a “militant with love.” Able to gain acceptance by black militants as well as by moderate churchmen, he has led key Watts community projects.

As ABC president, he hopes to strengthen black churches, to immerse them more deeply into the life of the denomination, and to build bridges between the races. In order to “leaven” disruptive tactics, he also wants to organize a national consultation between radicals and black clergy. Current black separatism is, he believes, only a transitional search for identity.

But the year ahead promises to be stormy. ABC officials report that white reaction against rising black tides has already resulted in revenue losses and disaffection of some churches. But the goatee-sporting Kilgore affirmed in a press conference that America’s best hope for the future lies with black churches. “Without them” he said, “we’d be in a hell of a fix.”

Sweazey At The Upusa Helm

In the second ballot of a tight four-way contest, leadership in the United Presbyterian Church, U. S. A., passed to Dr. George E. Sweazey, 64-year-old pastor of the Webster Groves United Presbyterian Church in suburban St. Louis.

The new moderator had barely been installed in San Antonio when he was asked for his views on issues before the assembly. Sweazey urged that the 181st General Assembly should receive black militant James Forman with “a good deal of sympathy.” The vigorous but gentle-spoken churchman stressed that he did not necessarily encourage “sympathy to his demands, but to the great urgency behind these demands.”

Sweazey has served as a trustee of Westminster and Lindenwood Colleges and Princeton Theological Seminary, and as a member of the church’s Fifty Million Fund National Committee. He is a member of the denomination’s Commission on Ecumenical Missions and Relations and is a former chairman of the Department of Evangelism of the National Council of Churches. Sweazey holds degrees from Princeton and the University of Berlin.

The new moderator thinks evangelism cannot be either exclusively social or exclusively concerned with the saving of souls. “There is no choice between the evangelical and the social gospel. You cannot have enough of either one.” In related comments he accused the Presbyterian Lay Committee of being “misguided” and added that “they … suffer from a sort of unrealism.” Sweazey also expressed personal opposition to the anti-ballistic missile system.

Student Role At Union

A new plan of government giving students an increased role in all phases of seminary life was developed at Union Seminary just before campus militants briefly took over the administration buildings in support of James Forman’s “Black Manifesto” demands.

Bible Publisher Multiplies The Word

Bibles are big business for Sam Moore, the man who is acquiring (for cash) Thomas Nelson and Sons in the United States, the 100-year-old publishing firm with assets topping $3 million. Moore, 38, who came to America from “the old country” twenty years ago with $600, has parlayed modest house-to-house family Bible sales (he made $18 the first week) into a vast publishing network that expects gross sales of more than $10 million this year.

The industrious entrepreneur is a native of Lebanon, of Roman Catholic background, and the product of evangelical mission schools in Beirut. After putting off a commitment to Christ in younger days, Moore accepted the Lord after reading “an old dusty family Bible” and seeking the counsel of a Christian friend.

Presbyterian medical missionary Thomas Lambie, who built a hospital in Bethlehem, and George Mueller’s book describing his life of faith were instrumental in Moore’s emerging Christian commitment and his decision to attend Columbia Bible College in South Carolina. Although his family was wealthy, Moore recalls, they cut him off because he came to America against their wishes.

After a year at Columbia, Moore was broke. The Bible-selling job was an instant success, however, and by the end of summer, sophomore Moore had bought a new car and had $1,000 left for his next year of school. Soon he was state—and then regional—leader for a force of door-to-door Bible salesmen. In 1958, with $1,000 cash and $1,000 from a bank, Moore launched National Book Company. The Nashville firm came out with its first family Bible (editions now sell for $19.95, $29.95 and $39.95) in 1964, and sales have doubled every year since.

Moore’s publishing network is under the umbrella company Royal Publishers Incorporated, the largest evangelical publishing house, according to Moore.

Nelson and Sons also specializes in Bibles; the Camden, New Jersey, firm originated the American Standard Version in 1901 and the RSV in 1952. Both have sold several million copies.

Moore conservatively estimates the market value of Royal and Nelson at over $8 million. And he said in an interview he is also “negotiating” to buy another company publishing some two hundred college textbooks. He declined to name the firm.

Nelson also publishes a popular loose-leaf encyclopedia and medical and juvenile books, and was an early entrant into paperback editions of the classics. Other publications include the Complete Concordance to the RSV, the first book to be composed with the aid of computers, and the New Testament Octapla and the Genesis Octapla, which feature eight versions of the text on facing pages.

Nelson in this country is a branch of a British company of the same name and descendant of an Edinburgh, Scotland, bookstore founded in 1798. Royal became publicly owned in 1962 and its stock is traded over the counter.

Subsidiary companies under Royal include National, which specializes in house-to-house sales; Varsity Press, concentrating on student markets; Dominion, which is primarily mail order; Omega, which supplies discount and department stores; and Catholic Publishers.

Royal’s offices circle the globe, but Moore lives in Nashville, where he attends a Baptist church, while maintaining membership in First Presbyterian Church of Johnson City, Tennessee.

Merger Trail

Passage of an initial union proposal for the Church of England and the Methodist Church appeared virtually certain after thirty of thirty-four Methodist synods of clergy and laity favored the current two-stage plan. The synod voting was a major reversal of the trend shown by circuit quarterly meetings in March and April when 478 circuits voted in favor, 341 against, and twelve tied.

In a semi-final vote May 6, the Anglican convocations endorsed the principles of the plan by a margin of three to one. The final ballot will be taken July 8, when the two convocations and the Methodist Church meet separately. The Methodist Conference vote must then be confirmed by the synods and passed back to the 1970 conference for final ratification.

Stage one would provide for intercommunion between the churches; stage two would produce complete organic union—accompanied by merging of the ministries. The latter, bitterly contested by both bodies, may be a long time coming.

A Setback For Evangelical Students

The theme for the meeting seemed appropriate, “Focus Seventy—A New Decade … A New Answer?” It was the first time in the ten years of annual conventions that a question mark had decorated not only the delegates’ thoughts but also the official convention title.

For the American Association of Evangelical Students (AAES), recently meeting at Asbury College, the question followed a year that, in the understatement of convention chairman James Davis of Asbury, “was not what had been hoped.” Since its inception in 1956 the lone evangelical student organization has had sporadic spurts of growth and attrition; this past year it suffered from disruptive communication and an inactive president who opted not to attend the convention and resigned shortly before it.

Davis spoke of the “lack of response and initiative” encountered on the part of member schools. The ninety-six students representing thirteen schools who attended the convention were fewer than had been forecast. The founder of the organization, Wheaton College, was among schools not represented.

Most of the students who did attend, however, expressed enthusiasm over the meetings, which featured devotional messages by E. Stanley Jones and J. Edwin Orr. Also included in the program were discussion groups that considered the goals of the AAES and how the organization can have a significant national voice, and the answering of the particular challenges found in the framework of an evangelical school: student government, intercollegiate activities, and evangelical social outreach.

A junior from Taylor University, Steve Honett, was selected by acclamation as the organization’s new president.

At the convention’s end the question marks concerning the AAES remained. Many delegates agreed with Honett’s observation, “I’m excited because of the hope generated by the convention.” Others withheld judgment, knowing that the inspiration of the convention and the zest of the new president can too easily fade, and realizing difficulties of reaching the high ideals that originally called the organization into being.

MICHAEL BOCK

Holiness Intensified

America’s 1.5 million conservative Wesleyans, most of whom belong to some fifteen small holiness denominations, intensified cooperative efforts recently with the addition of the Church of the Nazarene to the ranks of their chief interdenominational organization, the National Holiness Association. Entry of the 465,000 Nazarenes capped the NHA’s 101st annual convention in St. Louis, nearly doubling the organization’s formal membership, and bringing most of America’s “holiness” people under the official NHA umbrella for the first time.

Wesleyan-Arminian conventioners showed a growing (but still rudimentary) interest in social problems, and created the first NHA social-action commission. A seminar to explore social needs, especially in the inner city, was planned. Dr. Paul Kindschi, former NHA president, declined selection as executive secretary when the Wesleyan Church hesitated to release him as its Sunday-school secretary.

Sounds Of The Times

Priests have violated my law.… They have put no difference between the holy and profane.… The people of the land have used oppression, and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy.

The last eight verses of Ezekiel 22 read as if they had been composed this morning, and President Nathan Lynch Bailey of the Christian and Missionary Alliance made the most of the passage. In preaching before the annual meeting of his 1,300 North American churches, Bailey showed that spiritual deviation and social injustice are condemned in the same divine breath.

He called it “incongruous and incomprehensible” that Americans can get to the moon but can’t find a way to clothe and feed the underprivileged of earth. It was a well-timed rebuke, delivered only minutes before Apollo 10 left the pad at Cape Kennedy.

Bailey’s sermon in Pittsburgh’s spacious Civic Arena was especially significant because the theologically conservative and missionary-minded CMA has traditionally shied away from social concerns. “We evangelicals have tried to bury our heads in the sands of unconcern,” he said. “There have been social injustices that we have tolerated.”

Bailey, who at 59 was elected to a fourth three-year term as head of the growing² CMA, also chided evangelicals for their inflexibility. He said: “Much of what we have done was out of custom or tradition.” So-called non-liturgical churches can develop an even more binding liturgy, he added. Sometimes, he noted, “God cannot work because there is no place in the bulletin.”

Legislation at the five-day meeting was void of social action, but the sessions ended appropriately enough with an appeal from a black delegate. On a point of privilege just before adjournment he asked for prayer for James Forman and called for more conscientious recognition of blacks and other ethnic minorities in the CMA.

DAVID E. KUCHARSKY

Lebanon Government: Walking The Tightrope

Two years after the June, 1967, Arab-Israeli war, the sparks that ignited it are still flying. Now Lebanon is under fire from its students and the Arab bloc because the tiny half-Christian, half-Muslim country has exercised restraint in Mideast tensions.

Since Israel’s December 28 attack on Beirut International Airport, Palestinian sympathizers have been particularly unhappy with their largely conservative and pro-Christian government. Although Prime Minister Rashid Karamé claimed personally to support commando retaliation against Israel, the Muslim official adhered to government policy, refusing throughout his seventeen turbulent months in office to declare commando activity patriotic.

When he resigned in April, Karamé warned that “the government cannot take the side of any faction without splitting the country.”

His government did make military service compulsory after student demonstrations for the law in April developed into a four-day conflagration that left more than 100 dead and wounded.

Some government officials believe the four-day flame was fanned by outside intervention, and a border incident on April 30 seemed to provide confirmation. That day Syrian commandos of the Baath Party, which is banned in Lebanon, attacked Lebanese border guards.

Lebanon’s Muslim population tends to support Arab commandos, despite the nation’s official neutrality that reflects the opinions of most Christians. Although a church in north Lebanon was burned earlier this year, no open warfare has erupted between the nation’s Muslims and Christians since 1958. But the fuel for Lebanon’s crises is not only social and political—it is also religious.

LILLIAN HARRIS DEAN

$1.4 Million Move

St. Mary, Aldermanbury, Church has been moved from London to the campus of Westminster College (Presbyterian) in Fulton, Missouri, to commemorate a speech made at the school in 1946 by Winston Churchill. In his address, the late statesman coined the term “Iron Curtain.” Moving and rebuilding the 700-ton stone structure designed by famous architect Christopher Wren cost the college $1.4 million.

Stetson Loses Its Head; Mccormick’S Mckay Quits

The resignation of Dr. Paul F. Geren as president of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, is another rift in a sixty-year battle for control of the private school by the Florida Baptist Convention, according to some of the school’s trustees.

The 55-year old former diplomat said he would give no reason for his resignation in advance of action on it by the trustees May 30. He became president of the school less than two years ago. He came to Stetson after having served in the United States Foreign Service in India, Syria, Jordan, Rhodesia, and Libya. A noted economist and a World War II hero in Burma, he had been the first deputy director of the Peace Corps and a professor in American Baptist mission schools in Burma and Pakistan.

According to a long-time trustee, if Geren had not resigned, the faculty was prepared to carry out publicly a vote of “no confidence” by at least 90 per cent. Some twenty of the university deans had petitioned the trustees at their April 25 meeting asking for Geren’s resignation. Attempts at reconciliation were fruitless, board sources reported, because of at least six months of friction between the administration and the faculty over policies faculty thought were hindering the college’s academic development.

In addition, “at least 80 per cent” of the student body had become alienated, according to some of the trustees, and Geren had had a severe run-in with the board in February. He objected to the institution’s deficit financing and pushed his plan for a $10 million development-fund campaign, for which $80,000 already has been paid to a promotional fund.

Stetson trustees were mum on naming any prospects to succeed Geren in heading the 2,600-member student body at the Deland campus and the Law School in St. Petersburg.

Meanwhile, trustees of Chicago’s McCormick Theological Seminary declined to take action on President Arthur McKay’s request that his successor be named before September 1, 1970.

The board of the United Presbyterian school gave McKay a vote of confidence last month instead of accepting his proffered resignation.

Reasons for McKay’s leaving the post after thirteen years were said to be “personal and vocational.” But board chairman Harold Blake Walker, who is pastor of Evanston’s First Presbyterian Church, said “unrest on campus also had a lot to do with it.”

During the denomination’s General Assembly last month, supporters of the Latin-American Defense Organization took over McCormick’s administration building in a protest against urban-renewal demolition.

ADON TAFT

Madison Garden Revisited

For ten nights beginning June 13, Billy Graham will conduct evangelistic services in New York’s new Madison Square Garden. They may add up to be his most intensive effort to date, extending throughout the East and eventually across the country and abroad.

Each service will be televised the same night in Boston, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Video tapes subsequently will be shown in other cities.

Graham has lined up an especially impressive array of musical artistry for the crusade. Jerome Hines, Ethel Waters, Anita Bryant, and Norma Zimmer are among those who will sing, along with a delightful young folk-singing foursome from Australia, the Kinsfolk.

These will be the 50-year-old evangelist’s first public meetings in New York since his memorable and record-breaking sixteen-week crusade in the old Madison Square Garden in 1957. The new arena will accommodate 20,000 and is built atop Penn Central Station, making easy access for people from the Eastern seaboard.

GOD SUED

God is in trouble in Santa Rosa, California.

It all began when folksinger Lou Gottlieb deeded his thirty-one-acre ranch, a controversial hippie haven, to God. The reluctant county recorder finally gave in when Gottlieb showed him a coin on which was engraved “In God We Trust” and specified, “It’s this one.” As for taxes, said Gottlieb, “For God’s sake, I’ll pay them.” But, he added, it all would be “an interesting problem legally, as a test of the intensity of belief of the authorities around here.”

A week later, an Oakland secretary hit God with a civil summons for causing a lightning bolt to strike and destroy her home. The $100,000 damage suit charges God with “careless and negligent” operation of the universe, including the weather. Her attorney said he would try to collect by attaching Gottlieb’s ranch (“property owned by God”) when—and if—the deity fails to show up in court.

It appears that one way or another God will have his day in court.

Trouble In Book City

Religious books are in trouble because of the revolution in the Church. To survive, the religious book trade will have to come to grips with the new manifestations of religion springing up in contemporary culture.

This tone of concern and challenge was asserted by speakers at the May 13 annual meeting of the Religious Publishers Group of the American Book Publishers Council. Speaking to the theme of the meeting, “The Revolution in the Churches and Its Effect on Book Publishing,” Martin E. Marty, church-history professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School and associate editor of the Christian Century, observed that the revolution is “killing an old book market and creating a new one.” But religious publishers are slow to pick it up.

Marty noted religion still thrives both in private expression and in public affairs but is moving away from traditional religious institutions. So publishers need to discover authors, Marty said, who can communicate seriously with the “new para-institutional lay audience.” He also called for better books devoted to the search for personal meaning, a realm now held by “nutgroups and faddists.”

Roland W. Tapp, Westminster Press associate religious-book editor, listed twenty-five changes he feels will take place in the Church over the next few years. Some are: waning interest in church on the part of youth (but an increasing interest in religion), decreasing membership, continuing trend away from personal salvation toward social action, adoption of the Consultation on Church Union merger plan, de-emphasis on church building and overseas missions, theological shift away from the doctrines of transcendence and immanence, disappearance of sermons and Sunday-morning worship services, and a breakdown of authority—including that of the Bible, traditional doctrine, and church polity.

RICHARD L. LOVE

Clergy Power

Most all professions maintain associations to improve their own standards and status. A notable exception is America’s 250,000 clergymen.

That will change, however, with the formal launching July 1 of the Academy of Parish Clergy in Minneapolis under a three-year, $75,000 grant from the Lilly Foundation. Instigated by a 1965 article in the Christian Century and headed by Dr. Henry B. Adams of San Francisco Theological Seminary, the APC will seek participation by ministers of all faiths.

From Burma To Bangkok

The World Fellowship of Buddhists will move its headquarters from Burma to Bangkok, Thailand, where an international staff aided by government finances and supervision will man it. WFB delegates from nearly every nation that claims a Buddhist minority voted for the move in a meeting in Kuala Lampur, Malasia. WFB head Poon Diskul said the headquarters was moved because of political problems and limited access accorded foreigners in Burma. Buddhism is Thailand’s state religion and is protected by King Phumiphol.

The biannual conference also beefed up programs to win youth to Buddhism and to send out more missionaries.

WILLIAM T. BRAY

They Say

Churches of the future should be built for hippies and other radical youth, not for the present power structure, Columbia University architecture professor Percival Goodman told the National Conference on Religious Architecture’s thirtieth annual meeting in New York. “We have to ask ourselves who shall be our clients—those with long beards and long hair who look something like the disciples of Jesus or the Jewish patriarchs—or the others who have brought about war, and air and water pollution?”

Church Bodies Stung By New Taxes

Things looked bad—and seemed to be getting worse—in recent weeks for many religious bodies struggling to maintain a tax-exempt status. For example:

• In Nashville, six Protestant publishing firms, including the huge Southern Baptist Sunday School Board and the multi-million-dollar Methodist Publishing House, lost their exemption from property taxes in a ruling by the local tax assessor’s office. The office, announcing that property values of the firms would run to “many millions of dollars,” said its action was recommended by the Metropolitan Nashville legal department, since the firms were in commercial competition with other book houses. Both the Baptists and the Methodists said they would appeal.

Other agencies denied exemptions were the Methodist Board of Evangelism, the Seventh-day Adventists’ Southern Publishers Association, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated, and the National Baptist Publishing Board.

• Farther north, the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency announced it would no longer grant state loans or scholarships to students at at least twelve religiously oriented colleges. The decision, based on a 1963 amendment to the state constitution, included Philadelphia College of the Bible (which is appealing), Messiah College at Grantham, and Nyack Missionary College in New York, where sixty-two students whose homes are in Pennsylvania had their state aid taken away.

• Leaders of Protestants and Other Americans United, a non-sectarian group that crusades for separation of church and state, were shocked when the Internal Revenue Service decided to deny exempt status on gifts to POAU—claiming that POAU was an activist group that concerned itself with legislative activities. The organization, while denying the IRS claim, responded by deciding to split into two separate organizations—one a foundation to handle such tax-exempt activities as lectures and research, the other to concern itself with direct legislative action, and, more than likely, to maintain the POAU name.

• In Dayton, Ohio, the United Methodists’ Otterbein Press was faced with the possibility of losing its exemption from federal income taxes, because of commercial activities.

Despite the portents, New York City’s numerous large religious offices were given a respite from immediate concern. A proposed state law that would have given the city the right to pass and review exemptions died in committee. Likewise, an unprecedented Oregon proposal to tax church property on the basis of 25 per cent of its value died in the state Senate after passing the House.

JAMES HUFFMAN

Panorama

World Vision magazine was selected as “Periodical of the Year” by the Evangelical Press Association, which cited the missionary journal for “continuing strength” since its upgrading from house-organ status five years ago.

The restoration of prayer and Bible reading by some of Pennsylvania’s public-school systems has brought predicted results—a law suit contesting their snubbing of the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning such practices.

Wheaton College will offer a new program in Christian communications this September, leading to an M.A. degree.

Membership in the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, increased 3 per cent last year to 450,000 … Pentecostals showed the greatest increase (52 per cent) between 1951 and 1961 of all denominations in Canada.

What do seminarians read? At San Francisco Theological Seminary (United Presbyterian), the library’s most popular publication is the Berkeley Barb, hippie underground newspaper. Librarian David E. Green says it’s almost impossible to keep enough copies on hand.

A court suit testing the “constitutionality” of military chaplains is likely, says the executive director of the Military Chaplains Association in Washington, D. C. Dr. Karl Justus said the group called Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam is a chief instigator of a “growing desire to do away with military chaplains.”

DEATHS

JOSEF CARDINAL BERAN, 80, exiled Archbishop of Prague; in Rome.

CHARLES W. IGLEHART, 87, veteran Methodist missionary, professor, author, advisor to U. S. authorities in Japan; in Dunedin, Florida.

PAUL R. JACKSON, 65, national representative of the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches; in Chicago.

JULIAN PRICE LOVE, 74, former professor and acting president of Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, author; in Louisville.

JOSEPH H. OLDHAM, 94, pioneer of the modern ecumenical movement, honorary president of the World Council of Churches; in St. Leonards, England.

ABRAHAM VEREIDE, 82, founder of the International Prayer Breakfast movement; in Olney, Maryland.

World Parish

Membership in the Church of Scotland dropped by 18,190 in 1968, reducing the communion rolls to 1,201,833.… The Presbyterian Church of England lost 2,000 members last year, decreasing the total to 63,091.

Some 4,000 Baptists marched in a parade in Rosario, Argentina, to launch the Crusade of the Americas in that South American country.

Roman Catholics in São Paulo, Brazil, have been permitted for the first time to use the Protestant’s new Almeida version of the Bible.

The North American branch of the Sudan United Mission and the Evangelical Alliance Mission have merged, according to TEAM director Vernon Mortenson.

Evangelist Bob Harrison’s Mindanao crusade was attended by 31,500 Filipinos, 1,487 of whom made decisions for Christ.

Britain’s Baptist Union will retain membership in both the World and the British Councils of Churches as the result of a decisive vote at the union’s 1969 assembly.

The Soviet atheistic magazine Science and Religion is apparently showing Soviet acceptance of the Russian Orthodox Church. An article said a Russian Orthodox believer is a good citizen and patriot who loves his country; it failed to mention other religious groups in the U.S.S.R., such as Roman Catholics and Baptists.

Australian Council of Churches representatives, meeting in Sydney, agreed with a Roman Catholic view of the mass, saying: “Christ is truly present through the Holy Spirit but the manner of His presence cannot be precisely defined.” Catholic members said the word “sacrifice” referring to the mass meant the symbolic manner of Jesus’ death on the cross, not that his atonement was being repeated.

The American Bible Society presented its one-billionth Bible to President Richard M. Nixon at the White House.

Personalia

Suffragan Bishop Paul Moore, Jr., of Washington, D. C., is said to be the prime candidate to succeed the Right Rev. Horace W. B. Donegan, 68, as Episcopal Bishop of New York. Donegan said he intends to retire from the $30,000-a-year job at the denomination’s most prestigious diocesan post before 1972.

Dr. Don H. Morris has been elected chancellor and Dr. John C. Stevens, president and chief executive officer, of Abilene Christian College effective September 1 … Dr. Alden A. Gannett will become president emeritus of Southeastern Bible College, Birmingham, when the Rev. C. Sumner Wemp from Moody Bible Institute becomes the new president this fall.

James C. Suggs, managing editor of The Christian, the Disciples of Christ magazine, has been named national president of the Religious Public Relations Council.

Taylor University (Upland, Indiana) head football coach Robert Davenport has been appointed to a new post as director of University-Church Leadership Training Programs. The former UCLA All-American fullback plans expanded service to young people and churches, particularly through his “Wandering Wheels,” cross-country bicycling expeditions.

In a unification move, the trustees of New Brunswick Theological Seminary and Western Theological Seminary, Holland, Michigan, have named Dr. Herman J. Ridder of Western as president of both Reformed Church in America schools.

Beatle John Lennon, who caused an international stir in 1966 when he said the mop-haired singers were more popular than Jesus, will play the part of Christ in a thirteen-week British Broadcasting serial on the life of Christ.

LSD high priest Timothy Leary, who says he uses marijuana as part of his Hindu religious beliefs, was ecstatic over the U. S. Supreme Court’s upset of his 1965 marijuana conviction and announced he will run for governor of California next year.

England’s Queen Elizabeth II attended last month’s opening session of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland—the first monarch to do so in nearly 400 years. Northern Ireland’s militant anti-Catholic, the Rev. Ian Paisley, also attended to protest the presence of a Roman Catholic observer.