After quiet guerrilla skirmishes for almost three days, the Southern Baptist Convention made a frontal attack on an old foe during the last day of its annual meeting in St. Louis last month.
The enemy—as seen by 2,672 of the nearly 5,000 messengers (delegates) who voted on ths issue—is theological liberalism that is infecting the denominational Sunday School Board’s Bible commentary. The messengers asked the board to find a new writer for the Broadman commentary section on Genesis, asserting that it had failed to carry out the convention’s instructions of a year ago at the Denver meeting. Action then called for withdrawal of the controversial volume and its rewriting “with due consideration to the conservative viewpoint.”
The motion to fire the Genesis commentary writer, British scholar G. Henton Davies, drew great interest and sparked turgid debate, but even that was mild compared to verbal sniping over the matter at the 1970 convention.
The St. Louis gathering marked several firsts in Southern Baptist annals: Official youth participation at a convention (so successful that thirty minutes were allotted for a similar youth presentation next year), a resolution urging legal abortion in certain cases (see June 18 issue, page 30), grappling with the moral aspects of the Viet Nam war, and a new sally into the social-justice arena through a battery of resolutions covering judicial and prison reform, public funds and non-public schools, integration, anti-Semitism, and consumer rights (the latter was referred for further study).
The Broadman brouhaha stemmed from Davies’s interpretation of Genesis 22. The principal of Regent’s Park College in Oxford wrote in the now-banned commentary (black-market copies sell for at least $40, contraband watchers say) that God had not ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. “What Christian or humane conscience could regard such a command as coming from God?” he asked, concluding that the notion was a spinoff from the psychology of Abraham’s life.
After the historic vote in Denver to withdraw the volume and rewrite it, Broadman asked Davies to revise the text in harmony with conservative interpretation of the passage. Davies reportedly agreed but said he would not compromise his conclusions or give up his position on the authorship of the Torah.
Reacting to the motion of pastor Kenneth Barnett of Lawton, Oklahoma, that Davies be fired and another writer obtained, Sunday School Board president Conrad Willard of Miami, Florida, defended the board as having “followed to the letter” the Denver demand. He said the request then had not stipulated who should rewrite the objectionable material.
But messenger Kenneth Bowen, a Forest City, North Carolina, pastor, declared that he couldn’t see how a man whose view hadn’t changed could honestly rewrite the commentary. After sixteen minutes of debate, a voice vote, followed by a standing vote, was taken. But SBC president Carl Bates was unable to determine the results. A ballot count of 2,672 to 2,290 carried Barnett’s motion.
An earlier motion to delete the word “Broadman” from the name of the commentary was referred to committee; at one time delegates voiced fears that Barnett’s motion would suffer a similar fate, thus postponing all action on the commentary crisis until the 1972 convention.
Though the resolution on world peace came out nearly the same as last year’s, lively floor debate about the original wording of the statement evidenced what observers said was the first time the Southern Baptists had nationally come to grips with “moral ambiguities” in the Viet Nam war.
The passed version commended President Nixon for his troop-reduction efforts in Southeast Asia (he was scolded roundly in another resolution for appointing Henry Cabot Lodge as the U.S. envoy to the Vatican) and urged the chief executive to “continue our American withdrawal in keeping with our desperate concern for prisoners of war.…”
Messengers struck the word “accelerate” and substituted” “continue” (the 1970 resolution had “accelerate efforts to bring home … combat forces”). The messengers also eliminated the phrase “moral ambiguities” in reference to the war.
Bradenton, Florida, messenger William Brock, who made the motion to strike the phrase, told the intent audience: “When a man lays down his life for another man’s freedom, that’s not morally ambiguous.” And loud applause and amens followed the words of Guy Lozier of Elgin, Oklahoma, who said he was “a captain in the U. S. Army and a private in the Lord’s army”: “If we don’t pull out with a just settlement, we will be a party to a blood-letting.… If this is immoral, we should withdraw our police forces” at home.
The resolution on school integration reaffirmed the value of public-school education, called for efforts to improve its quality, and asked God’s guidance in “the midst of social change that our attitudes and actions may speed the progress of justice.…” An additional paragraph included in the resolution submitted by John McClanaham of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, was deleted in the approved form: “… that we accept the recent unanimous decision of the Supreme Court as a further step toward school integration in fulfillment of its historic action seventeen years ago.”
In refuting prejudice, the SBC singled out for special concern anti-Semitism, “which some think erroneously is inherent in Christianity, and which we disavow.” Prison and judicial reform resolutions noted problems such as the “warehousing of bodies” and called for expanded and innovative ministries to ensure greater efficiency and justice.
The resolution on public aid and religious education reaffirmed the traditional Southern Baptist stance that public funds for education be channeled only through public institutions that don’t discriminate on religious or other grounds.
The convention, opposing all use of beverage alcohol, asked the U. S. Congress to pass laws prohibiting liquor advertising on TV and radio, and its use on planes and other public conveyances.
For the first time, the 11.6-million-member denomination commissioned foreign and home missionaries in a joint service. Thirty received marching orders as 13,000 Baptists sang “Send Me, O Lord.” The Foreign Mission Board reported a total of 2,501 missionaries (a new high) in seventy-six countries last year, five (Laos, Upper Volta, Mozambique, Barbados, and Surinam) entered by Southern Baptists for the first time.
Enrollment in church organizations (Sunday school, Training Union, Woman’s Missionary Union, and Brotherhood) was down, while church music enrollment showed a small gain for 1970.
James H. Landes, pastor of First Baptist Church of Richardson, Texas, was named SBC first vice-president; Warren Hultgren, pastor of Tulsa’s First Baptist Church, is the new second vice-president.
Canadian Presbyterians: Down The Middle Of The Road
The ninety-seventh General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Canada heard a sobering report of “a continuing decline in many significant areas,” including membership (down from 198,881 in 1960 to 186,584 in 1970) and Sunday-school enrollment (a ten-year decrease of 35,000).
Ministers and elders from the forty-four presbyteries of Canada’s third-largest Protestant denomination, meeting last month in Toronto, elected Dr. Murdo Nicholson, 60-year-old minister of Grace Presbyterian Church in Calgary, Alberta, as moderator, and acted on two particularily thorny issues—one in international affairs, the other a doctrinal question.
The international issue concerned a resolution expressing satisfaction with Canadian recognition of the People’s Republic of China and the new relations between the two countries. The Canadian Presbyterian Church has a missionary force in Taiwan, and some commissioners argued that adoption of the resolution could in some way endanger the missionaries and the people among whom they worked. The assembly passed instead a substitute motion that expressed concern for the people of Taiwan during a period of radical political transition.
The doctrinal issue concerned attempts by the Presbytery of Westminster in British Columbia to oust the Reverend Calvin Chambers as minister of First Presbyterian Church in New Westminster. His involvement in the “charismatic renewal,” said the presbytery, had introduced division in the congregation. The General Assembly, on appeal, voted to establish a commission to deal with the alleged tension in the congregation. It also instructed another commission to make a wider study of the doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit and the related subject of glossolalia and other charismatic gifts.
Another resolution called for legislation granting “the right of silence in the courts of law to clergymen of recognized religions” and requested that “the criteria of privileged communication be the same for ministers of religion as for lawyers.”
The delegates rapped the government over “the use of public funds for the production of Canadian movies exploiting violence, immorality, and sex.” The protest was aimed at loans and grants made by the Canadian Film Development Corporation, a government agency.
They opposed legalizing the distribution and possession of drugs, but expressed concern over the severity of the punishment meted out to youthful offenders.
“Young adult observers” persuaded the assembly to pass a motion calling for the inclusion of ten to twenty more contemporary-style hymns in the upcoming new denominational hymnal.
The Canadian Presbyterians displayed no desire to participate in formal church-union negotiations such as those involving the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Christian Church (Disciples). But, declared the new moderator, they were eager to foster a spirit of cooperation and understanding with all churches.
LESLIE K. TARR
Irish Ire
The Irish Presbyterian General Assembly was the scene of spirited debate over a country congregation’s protest against grants made by the World Council of Churches to African liberation groups and the appointment of a Buddhist to the WCC staff. The assembly directed its Inter-Church Relations Board to reconsider the church’s membership in the WCC and to report at the next assembly. An amendment reaffirming the church’s membership and asking only that the board re-examine the issues involved was rejected 223 to 200.
S. W. MURRAY
Reformed Church: Growing Old Alone
The General Synod of the 225,000-member Reformed Church in America, described as America’s oldest denomination “with an uninterrupted ministry,” voted to keep it that way at its annual meeting last month in Iowa. Although the RCA has sent observers to merger discussions involving the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. and the Presbyterian Church in the U. S., the delegates rejected invitations even to talk about possible courtship. After lengthy debate they did vote approval of a “union synod” formed by the RCA Synod of New Jersey and the United Presbyterian Synod of that state.
The synod restored a $4,000 budget item for World Council of Churches administrative purposes but refused to reinstate a $9,000 administrative grant to the National Council of Churches.
Seminarian Glenn Pontier, facing possible federal indictment for refusing to accept alternate service as a conscientious objector, won support “as a brother Christian,” but delegates refused to endorse his actions. They also rejected the New Jersey synod’s draftcounseling program as an official activity of the RCA.
Graham Crusade: Satanists Lose To Jesus Power
On the second night of his thirteen-day Chicago crusade last month evangelist Billy Graham knocked Satan worship. Four nights later a hundred Satan worshipers—described by the Chicago Daily News as “young hell-raisers”—showed up to knock Graham.
The Satanists hooted and mocked during the sermon, then gathered at the rear intending to march forward and disrupt the invitation part of the service. But street Christians surrounded them and blocked the way, praying, rapping about Christ, and outchanting the Satanists with Jesus cheers.
Police evicted two Satanists forcibly, and the others left peacefully after setting off a cherry-bomb firecracker. Graham aides credited the Jesus people, who came mostly from West Chicago and Milwaukee, for staving off serious disruption.
A total of 326,000 attended the meetings, and just under 12,000 of them made public decisions for Christ; more than half of the decisions were described as first-time. The largest crowd at the cavernous McCormick Place main hall was the Saturday youth-night audience of 37,500 with 1,800 decisions. Graham arrived back from Tricia Nixon’s White House wedding (see below) just in time for that meeting and held up a piece of the wedding cake.
Striking a familiar note he warned that if revival does not soon come nationally “we are finished as a free democracy.” He said the weakness of age is not a lack of intelligence but an inability to restrain human nature by acts of reason. The remedy, he prescribed, is Christ’s power within.
The Jesus people—living proof that revival may indeed be on the way—were in evidence throughout the crusade. “Billy Graham is far-out, but we don’t dig that church trip too much,” said street-Christian leader Ron Rendleman of West Chicago, referring to the last item in the evangelist’s instructions to new believers: read the Bible, pray, witness, and go to church.
Graham digs the churches, though, and vice versa. Hundreds more churches cooperated than in his 1962 Chicago campaign. Even the once aloof Moody Bible Institute loosened up, providing leadership, facilities, and radio time.
A “rival revival” was held in a hall beneath Graham’s by fundamentalists protesting the evangelist’s meetings for being “anti-biblical.” They were led by a pastor who heads the Remember the Pueblo Committee.
The Rain Stopped, The Music Began
It stopped raining just long enough for Tricia Nixon and Edward Finch Cox to be married in the White House rose garden as planned. Reporters wondered whether to credit clergy guests Billy Graham or Norman Vincent Peale with the brief respite. Peale replied jokingly, “They told me Billy had been working on it, but nothing happened, so I took over.”
The twelve-minute ceremony was drafted entirely by the bride, a “birthright Quaker.” It combined elements from Roman Catholic, Methodist, and Episcopal rites. Instead of responding “I do” the couple said “It is,” answering the question, “Is it in this spirit and for this purpose that you have come hither to be joined together?” The question was based on a short love-theme “address to the bride and groom” written by a Lebanese philosopher. Congressional chaplain Edward G. Latch, 70, former pastor of the Methodist church the Nixons attended during the Eisenhower administration, officiated. (Tricia attended Brownie troop there but not Sunday school.)
Quakers have no official wedding rites, said a spokesman for the Friends Meeting of Washington, and many, like Tricia, compose their own. But, he said, Quaker ceremonies usually have no ministers (couples make their own declarations) and no music (Tricia had military and dance bands). “Tricia would have made a beautiful Quaker bride,” he sighed.
After the wedding President Nixon danced with the women in his family and several others, including Lynda Johnson Robb. It was the only time he had danced in public since his arrival at the White House. “I didn’t dance until I was 21,” he said. “My parents were Quakers and they didn’t allow it. They didn’t believe in this sort of thing.”
Mrs. Robb said it was the same with her daddy. “He grew up as a Baptist and he wasn’t supposed to dance. But he snuck off and did it. He was a backsliding Baptist.”
JOHN NOVOTNEY
Ncc: A Rare Rebuff
The faltering National Council of Churches suffered a blow from its own General Board last month. A staff-initiated proposal for a major conference this fall to help end the war in Southeast Asia drew surprising resistance at the board’s two-day spring meeting in Atlantic City.
The issue centered not on whether to call a conference but on whether the call should presume “the immorality of the continued participation by the United States in the Viet Nam war.” The staff touted the presumption as crucial to their intent.
The 250-member board almost always goes along when the staff argues strongly. This time, however, board members entertained an amendment from the floor to delete the “immorality” presumption and instead assign to the conference the purpose of confronting “the moral issues involved” in America’s continued participation in the war.
A fifteen-minute debate followed during which the NCC inner circle sought to beat down the change. Arguments from Episcopal bishop John Burt and Dr. Eugene Smith of the World Council of Churches, and from the NCC’s leading anti-war critic, Robert Bilheimer, were offset by an eloquent plea from former congressman Brooks Hays, a vice-president of the council.
Smith, who heads the U. S. arm of the WCC, urged that the conference presume the immorality of continued participation. He called the debate “one of the moments of truth in the life of the General Board.” Hays, the first to speak for the amendment, argued that though he recognized this immorality, the effectiveness of the conference depended upon a more objective outlook.
A show of hands gave the amendment forty-nine votes, with fifty against and three abstaining. United Presbyterian stated clerk William Thompson, who recently picketed and fasted in front of the White House but who favored the amendment, called for a recount. The second and this time conclusive vote gave the amendment fifty-three votes with fifty still against but only one abstaining.
Bilheimer and his colleagues were visibly shaken by the outcome. NCC president Cynthia Wedel twice intimated she would entertain a motion for reconsideration. But discussion trailed off into other matters. Another amendment struck down a provision to invite the World Council to send guests to the conference. Still another included a call for prayer.
Bilheimer advised the board that the amendments probably would discourage the financial donors to whom he was planning to appeal. Then a board member took the floor to observe that such considerations should not be allowed to affect decisions.
Some felt the amendments were made merely for strategic or tactical reasons, and that may be so. But an underlying factor may be the old tension caused by the desire to make the council both “prophetic” and inclusive. This conflict has been tearing at the ecumenical movement increasingly in recent years and has helped cause the NCC’s financial trouble. It is a major challenge facing the committee that is drawing up plans for an NCC successor organization.
The council’s dollar pinch has reduced its staff from 181 in 1968 to 120 now. Further cutbacks are planned this year and next. The latest announced executives to leave include the Reverend Blahoslav Hruby, managing editor of the Religion in Communist Dominated Areas newsletter. He was scheduled to leave June 30. At the meeting, however, he still had hopes of attracting last-minute gifts that would save the publication. Only five of the thirty-three NCC member communions were said to have made any contribution to support RCDA in its nearly ten-year history.
The meeting featured several unusually stimulating reports and speeches. A women’s liberation-type presentation elaborated ways in which church policies discriminate against women. Former NCC president J. Irwin Miller, sounding a note much more familiar to liberals, said repentance in 1971 means “reforming our institutions.” “On a clear day,” he said, “you can stand atop the Empire State Building and see four thousand agencies of government.”
DAVID KUCHARSKY
Up The Down Roller Coaster: Presbyterians Protest Angela
The granting of $10,000 of United Presbyterian money to the Angela Davis Defense Fund is causing more upheaval in the church than the 1963 arrest of the then stated clerk of the 3.1-million-member denomination, Eugene Carson Blake, when he was denied permission to ride a roller coaster with his black friends in a Baltimore, Maryland, amusement park.
The furor has also eclipsed that raised when Black Manifesto-maker James Forman appeared at the 1969 General Assembly to press reparations demands on Presbyterians. Several congregations (Anchorage, Alaska; Tacoma, Washington; and Philadelphia) have voted to withhold further mission money from the denomination. And by June 11, Stated Clerk William P. Thompson had received more than 1,800 protest letters. Perhaps ten others favored the grant, made from a $100,000 allocation for an Emergency Defense Fund of the Council on Church and Race (see June 18 issue, page 29).
Information director Frank Heinze of Philadelphia said the reaction was “much worse now” than the commotion caused by either the Forman or Blake episodes. He said seventy-five local sessions had, by June 11, officially protested the grant.
The Oregon Synod, however, circulated to its congregations a clarification and defense of the grant. And Lois H. Stair, first woman moderator of the church, sent two “special communications” regarding the Angela Davis controversy to all United Presbyterian pastors. Miss Davis, a black militant, is an avowed Communist charged with murder, conspiracy, and kidnapping in connection with a San Rafael, California, court shootout last August in which four persons were killed.
Surprisingly, the Davis affair all but obscured an apparently equally potent powderkeg: the granting of $25,000 for bail and legal aid for one of thirteen Black Panthers arrested in a New York pre-dawn raid in 1969. Those Panthers were acquitted this May.
That grant, made in July of 1970, provoked regional—but little national—alarm within the denomination. So far, according to Heinze, $66,000 of the $100,000 has been allocated. The other large single grant was $15,000 to the NAACP. Fifteen groups or individuals in all have received money. The United Front of Cairo, Illinois, got $1,000.
The $100,000 was from reserve funds of the National Missions Board, not from current mission giving, Mrs. Stair said. Among protesting sessions were those of California’s 2,500-member San Marino Community Church and the 7,500-member Hollywood First Church. The latter said the grant was “completely alien to the purposes of church members who give money to the national church.”
One pastor who opposes the Davis grant said the action will cost the denomination at least $5 million in contributions to overseas and domestic missions.
Los Angeles Times religion writer John Dart quoted Southern California Synod official W. Sherman Skinner as saying the grant was not out of character for the denomination: “The United Presbyterian Church has accepted a role of advocacy for minorities, for the poor, for the oppressed. That role has led to various actions and the council on church and race considered the grant to be a part of that role.”
Meanwhile, six black clergy and laymen in the church pledged $10,000 saying that Miss Davis should be assured of a fair trial and that they felt a “moral obligation” to reimburse the legal fund. Mrs. Stair replied that their action filled her with “gratitude, joy, and sadness.” The sadness, she said, was because “once again the blacks have found it necessary to make the first move of love and reconciliation.”
Heinze said the $10,000 would be repaid by twenty blacks who had each pledged $500 “out of their own pockets.”
RUSSELL CHANDLER
Religion In Transit
The New York legislature last month passed a measure providing $33 million in state funds to non-public schools for non-religious educational services; Governor Rockefeller was expected to sign it.… Parochial-school leaders in Illinois, meanwhile, praised state senate passage of a $30 million bill for nonpublic schools; approval of the aid package by the House and Governor Ogilvie was expected.
Radio station WRVR, owned by interdenominational Riverside (New York) Church, will go into a news and public-affairs format in September and carry commercials for the first time.… Atlanta’s newest TV station, WHAB-TV, devoted to religious programming, began daily telecasts last month. Scheduled programs include a hard-rock music and testimony show for teens by hip Christian DJ Scott Ross.
The white North Mississippi Conference of the United Methodist Church voted overwhelmingly last month against merging with its black counterpart. The black conference had already approved the merger; the negative vote of the white laymen (white ministers favored it) killed the proposal.
A twenty-six-week, one-hour TV series on the Acts of the Apostles, a part of the popular Bauman Bible Telecasts, will be aired by 200 TV stations on the nationwide Educational Television System. United Methodist Minister Edward W. Bauman originated the program twelve years ago in Washington, D.C.
“Jesus Spots,” dramatizing highlights of Jesus’ teachings, are part of a multi-media campaign to show to a mass audience “Jesus, the reconciler,” according to a spokesman for the United Presbyterian-United Methodist venture.
Two North Carolina ministers have written a civil marriage ceremony that omits all mention of God, Christ, or religion. It is to be used by local magistrates, one of whom said he had never heard of anybody complaining about the “religious” service now in use.
Five men have been indicted in Houston, Texas, on mail fraud charges. They were accused of operating under the name of a non-existent church and selling $275,000 worth of bonds by mail to purchasers who thought they were underwriting a new sanctuary.
Construction has begun on what will be the largest Mormon temple in the world: a six-towered, $14 million structure on a fifty-seven-acre hilltop site near the nation’s capital. It is slated for completion in May, 1974.
Personalia
Mrs. Elizabeth Glass Barlow, a Christian Science practitioner from New York, was named church president at the annual meeting of the Mother Church in Boston last month.
An admitted homosexual United Methodist minister, Gene Leggett, 36, was suspended by the denomination’s Southwest Texas Annual Conference by a 144–117 vote after an emotional meeting and pleas on his behalf by the Gay Liberation Front.
Houghton College president Stephen W. Paine has announced he will quit his post during the summer of 1972; he has been asked to become chancellor of the institution then.
Edna Ballard, titular head of the I Am religious movement, died February 10 in her Chicago home after a brief illness but the event went unpublicized because the movement doesn’t believe in death. She was in her eighties.
Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian Orthodox Church has a new patriarch. The electoral committee chose Archbishop Abuna Theophilos, 64.
Anglican vicar Richard Easton, the first divorced New Zealand priest to remarry with the church’s blessing, wed Susan Brockie, a divorcee, in a ceremony conducted in Wellington by a Presbyterian minister and an Anglican bishop.
After twenty-seven years in the priesthood, Roman Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Bernard M. Kelly of Providence, Rhode Island, resigned from active ministry in protest against “policies of the U. S. hierarchy.” The bishops, he complained, ignored “their own scientific report calling for serious changes in priestly ministry and life style,” such as optional celibacy. Active in anti-war efforts, he also cited hierarchical foot-dragging on social issues.
Mrs. Howard Davison, daughter of the late Dr. Abraham Vereide, was named Churchwoman of the Year by Religious Heritage of America for her work in organizing the Congressional Wives Prayer Group and extending the work of her father, who founded the Presidential Prayer Breakfast.
Former Presbyterian Survey editor Ben Hartley, fired last February by the magazine’s directors, is now employed with a real-estate and resort-development company in Atlanta.
Dr. Edward F. Manthei, president of Chicago Seminary since 1966, has resigned to become pastor of the Broadmoor Community Church of Colorado Springs.
World Scene
The Fiji Council of Churches (Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic) is negotiating with the National Christian Council of India for a three-year evangelistic mission to Fiji’s huge non-Christian Indian population.
A Cessna 206 destined for Zaria, Nigeria, has been christened the “Friendship of Pittsburgh”; it will be Wycliffe’s thirty-sixth plane to serve the Jungle Aviation and Radio Service (JAARS).
A pastor and a medical doctor spent three days in a Bulgarian prison after they were arrested on charges of smuggling 200 Bibles into the country.
The United Methodist Church of Rhodesia plans to go into copper mining to make sure no white company takes over the claim owned by the church in Arnoldine. The church says it wants to use the proceeds to improve living standards of blacks.
Valencia, Spain’s Second Baptist Church has become the first in the Spanish Baptist Union to buy property in its own name.
For the first time a daily evangelical program will be televised over Tele Monte-Carlo, Monaco, reaching parts of France and Italy. Sixty-two three-minute programs will be televised this month and next.
Merger plans for three Swedish free churches (Baptist Union, Mission Covenant, and Methodist) are definitely out, reliable reports indicate.
A traveling Baptist Bible school in Indonesia finished its first term recently with 145 students completing the two courses offered.
Unification with Russian Orthodox groups outside the Soviet Union that don’t recognize the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate has been proposed by leaders of the Orthodox Church in Russia.
Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Novgorod has called for the removal of the church’s 300-year-old “curses” against a dissident Russian Orthodox group called Old Believers.
Plans to complete Portsmouth’s Anglican Cathedral as a permanent memorial to the D-Day landings in France have been canceled because of insufficient funds.
Congregations of the Church of Scotland are finding that American-style fund-raising techniques—using visual aides and short pulpit talks by laymen—pay off.
