On the eve of its twenty-first birthday, the beleaguered National Council of Churches agreed on a reorganization aimed at getting a new lease on life.
The plan is a compromise. But it represents something of a victory for ecumenists over activists. A struggle between those whose main interest is to see how inclusive they can make the NCC, and those who are primarily interested in its social clout, has increasingly been coming into the open.
Dr. Thomas J. Liggett, now the key figure in the reorganization move, suggested that the council may do less in the future but do it better. Meanwhile, he declared, “We hope this plan will commend itself to some denominations not now in the council.”
The reorganization plan was approved by the 255-member NCC General Board during a two-day meeting in New Orleans last month. It now goes to the NCC’s thirty-three member denominations for further consideration. A timetable calls for final ratification by the NCC General Assembly, to be held in Dallas in late 1972.
The restructure proposal, which represents the work of a twenty-two-member committee headed by Liggett, calls for that to be the last General Assembly, a triennial legislative meeting. The assembly’s functions would then be assumed by a Governing Board that would be an enlarged version of the present General Board.
The most debated facet of the reorganization plan during the New Orleans meeting was how much money should be set aside each year for the Governing Board to use as it sees fit. The lack of any appreciable amount of such funds frustrates the present General Board. Most of the money that comes to the NCC is earmarked, and the General Board has in the past adopted numerous programs for which little money could be found.
Activists sought, in effect, to make relatively large undesignated donations to the council a virtual condition of membership. The Reverend Robert G. Torbet, ecumenical officer of the American Baptist Convention, warned that such a move could nudge the ABC out of the NCC; the board voted to keep the restructure committee’s ceiling of $50,000 a year for the so-called priority contingency fund.
Another tension that has plagued the council since its inception in 1950 is that it has been out of touch with the grass roots. The restructure seeks to guarantee more involvement in decision-making by lay men and women, young people, and minority ethnic people.
Dr. Michael Watson, a physician from Bamberg, South Carolina, who serves on the United Methodist delegation to the General Board, doubts that it will work. “Liberal church professionals will continue to dominate the council,” he said in an interview.
The 52-year-old Liggett concedes that the plan doesn’t please everyone, but argues that a compromise was necessary. He characterizes the proposal as an attempt to accommodate the “diaspora of decision-making in the denominations.” He says it will seek to bring to the Governing Board those people who really hold the power in the NCC member denominations, both lay and clergy.
Liggett, a round, pleasant man, is head of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) missions arm. He was a missionary to Latin America for twenty years and for a time served as president of the interdenominational Protestant seminary in Puerto Rico. He also taught at the interdenominational seminary in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Liggett’s committee was created in January of this year after the General Board failed to show enough enthusiasm over the work of a special task force. That group had called for the NCC to be succeeded by a new organization composed almost entirely of consortia. Black churchmen construed it as a “cop-out” and called for continuation of the present NCC.
The new model provides for continuing program units along with consortia. It also introduces the concept of “matrix management,” an organizational process currently being tried by a number of business enterprises. Under this arrangement there are both horizontal and vertical lines of authority and responsibility. The horizontal lines are set up to make use of specialists for key projects, often when these need to be accomplished quickly.
It is clear that the new structure will provide the possibility of tighter control over programs and pronouncements. Whether this potential control is exercised, however, is an open question.
Because of unresolved differences, the NCC in recent years has been increasingly obliged to trim its budget. The result has been slow disintegration. Its youth ministry has gone out of existence. Its women’s organization has broken away. Numerous programs have been curtailed because of inadequate funding for executive salaries, including Faith and Order, and Evangelism.
Latest to part company with the NCC is A Christian Ministry in the National Parks (see June 18 issue, page 31). Director Warren Ost said savings to be made “by severing our administrative relationship to the NCC at this point in our history, we believe, will mean the survival of the program.” Ost reported that the NCC had ceased giving money to the ministry and that the ministry’s affiliation with the NCC was proving an impediment to obtaining outside funding.
The NCC is also losing sponsorship of the newsletter Religion in Communist Dominated Areas after terminating a stipend for its managing editor, the Reverend Blahoslav Hruby. A board resolution adopted in New Orleans expressed thanks to Editor Paul B. Anderson and Hruby and noted “the possibility of some continuing cooperative relationship to the council to be determined hereafter in accordance with established procedures.” Hruby is determined to resume publication if funds can be secured.
In other action, the board called for further investigation of the Kent State killings and urged suspension of all military and economic aid to Pakistan until “the President reports to the Congress that the government of Pakistan is cooperating fully in allowing the situation in East Pakistan to return to reasonable stability and that the refugees from East Pakistan in India have been allowed, to the extent feasible, to return to their homes and to reclaim their lands and properties.” The board also urged support to assure for East Pakistan political leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman “a full and open trial … and clemency in the event of his conviction.”
But the board turned down a request to review the case of an American girl who had to leave her husband, a Soviet citizen, because she was refused a residence visa by Soviet authorities. The board cited “the inadequacy of firm information with respect to the facts in this case.”
A welfare reform bill passed by the U. S. House of Representatives was termed “unacceptable” because it falls short of criteria the NCC has set up. A major policy statement on health care was adopted, urging equal access to health services with the burden of payment varying in proportion to ability to pay.
A sad note hung over the meeting after it was announced that a young student member of the board had been murdered the week before.
Let’S Hear It For Asbury
Francis Asbury, only 26 when he left England for Philadelphia to aid John Wesley, became the “father of American Methodism.” His arduous journeys, undertaken despite frequent illness and great pain, and his adherence to the simple themes of the Gospel give American Methodists something to be proud of—and they showed it last month when they celebrated the bicentenary of Asbury’s landing in the United States.
Held immediately after the World Methodist Conference in Denver, the Lake Junaluska (North Carolina) celebration September 3–5 included Methodists from several parts of the world. Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., of Columbia, South Carolina, gave one of four historical addresses. He stressed the hardships Asbury endured, but refused to credit his success in the colonies to Asbury’s habits of rising at daylight or reading the Bible and meditating while riding. Asbury himself probably would have disagreed.
Another of the addresses emphasized Asbury’s lack of formal training—he quit school at an early age. Asbury felt it was a help rather than a hindrance; he didn’t have to unlearn a formal, stiff pulpit style.
Of the 500 delegates who attended, one-third were youth. A folk mass and musical about drugs highlighted the three-day affair. “Just Us,” a folk quintet from Emory and Henry College, Virginia, inspired the delegates with an enthusiastic version of “Amazing Grace.” At that point Francis Asbury would have felt right at home.
Care At 25
An eight-cent commemorative stamp will be issued October 27 at New York to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of CARE (Cooperative for American Remittance to Everywhere). Among the organizations that founded CARE and have helped direct its program for a quarter of a century are American Baptist Relief, Church of the Brethren World Ministries Commission, Congregational-Christian Service Committee, the Salvation Army, and General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.
Starting originally with food and clothing packages for war-stricken Europe and Asia, CARE now sends thousands of self-help kits annually to assist poverty-stricken persons in underdeveloped nations in raising their standard of living.
Among other things, CARE has sent 750,000 kits of farm implements, 275,000 sewing machines, 297,000 woodworking kits, and enough seeds to raise 77,000 tons of fresh vegetables.
GLENN EVERETT
Black Baptists Condemn Racial Separation
The head of the nation’s largest Negro organization last month lashed out against the “theology of liberation,” put down black theology as “racist,” and suggested that eliminating persons over age sixty-five would be a more humane way to ensure population control than legalizing abortion.
Dr. Joseph H. Jackson, for the past seventeen years president of the 6.3-million-member National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Incorporated, described black theology as “a gospel of blacks against whites” in a paper given at the denomination’s annual convention in Cleveland, Ohio. More than 25,000 delegates attended.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the president of the three-million-member National Baptist Convention of America, another black denomination, made a plea for quality education. “The only thing we want is the chance for our children to read and be taught from the same books that Mr. White Man is taught from,” said Dr. James Clark Sams, 62, in an address to 5,000 at the city’s Civic Auditorium.
The head of the church’s Social Justice Committee, Dr. E. Edward Jones, plugged for a nationwide campaign for quality education for black children through busing and insistence upon qualified teachers. “Busing is necessary to achieve racial balance which leads, in part, to the kind of quality education we seek,” said Jones, a Shreveport, Louisiana, resident.
In his presidential address, Dr. Sams—like his counterpart in the larger National Baptist Convention—took a slap at racial separatism: “As Christians, we are lightholders for a confused and disturbed world. Unless we get to the point where we can take a brother, regardless of race, by the hand, we’ll all end up in hell.”
Dr. Jackson, at the Cleveland meeting, charged in his paper on black theology that it polarizes races, promotes racial segregation, and could negate civil-rights progress. A special target for his criticism was the Reverend James H. Cone, a Negro who is a theology professor at Union Seminary in New York. Cone is an exponent of radical black theology, and his writings espouse the revolt of blacks against whites.
“He not only polarizes blacks and whites in this country,” Jackson said of Cone, “but he freezes the polarization and leaves little or no latitude for future harmony to be achieved.”
Jackson’s paper was unanimously approved—and became an official position of the denomination—by the church’s board of directors.
Jackson, who doesn’t reveal his age, was re-elected to his nineteenth term as president of the church. In the prepared text of his annual address, he compared abortion to euthanasia as a destroyer of life. Delegates approved his statement condemning abortion—the denomination’s first stand on the issue.
The forced sterilization of welfare mothers is “too high a price” for relief, he said, adding: “A dollar in exchange for the right of life and a threat to the vitals of one’s being is a dollar for damnation.”
On the subject of euthanasia versus abortion, Jackson rhetorically asked: “Would it not be better to begin with people over sixty-five and eliminate the undesirables and clear the way for a new crop of human beings to come? Would it not be better to eliminate the confirmed criminals, dope addicts and peddlers, and all of those who have had their chance in life and have sinned against the opportunity? Would it not be rather selfish for this generation to insist upon remaining while it eliminates the innocent and makes a place for the guilty and for those who have proved to be unworthy?”
Australian Evangelicals: Up From Down Under
Over the platform hung the sign, “Christ calls us to a new obedience.” The National Evangelical Congress of Australia, the first such gathering to be held in that country, took the motto to heart as it tried to find out what obedience to Christ means for evangelicals in Australia in the 1970s.
Some 550 evangelicals from throughout the country gathered in Melbourne for the congress. Delegates followed a rigorous schedule, listening to position papers and participating in discussion groups from 7 A.M. until 10 at night.
Sir Paul Hasluck, Australia’s governor general, opened the August 23–28 conference by advising theologians to challenge men to respond to the whole of existence rather than simply to tell them they are sinners. Dr. Leon Morris, principal of Ridley College at the University of Melbourne, gave the opening address on “The Authentic Gospel.” Sharing the platform were the primate of Australia, Archbishop Frank Woods of Melbourne, and the archbishop of Sydney, Marcus Loane. Principal speaker was Canon Michael Green, head of St. John’s College, Nottingham, England.
A key thrust of the congress was the responsibility evangelicals must assume for their full role in the community regardless of whether this affords them opportunities for evangelism. In line with this, several speakers from outside the evangelical tradition were asked to say how they view evangelicals—an unusual feature for this country.
Mrs. Faith Bandler, an Australian aborigine, grabbed headlines in the daily papers with her accusation that Australians in general are racists. As a result, an action group to promote evangelical concern for aboriginal people was immediately formed.
Others from outside included a prominent Anglo-Catholic and a trades unionist. Several Christian radicals, speaking for alienated youth, criticized the faults of the older generation.
The congress adopted a statement recommending that evangelicals play a larger role in community affairs, and that they work for a church less dominated by the clergy and more ready to allow laymen to fulfill their ministry and to participate fully in liturgical reform.
Delegates were impatient at what they felt was the stuffiness of many Anglican practices, and were wholeheartedly with Green when he complained that too often converts are asked to be converted not only to Christ but to “sixteenth-century English, twelfth-century architecture, and fourth-century clothes.” If the will of the congress prevails, Anglican worship will be drastically altered—but it will be done in obedience to the Gospel. The primacy of the biblical revelation was never questioned.
Although there were discussions about the ministry of women—centering on what the Bible has to say about the matter—there was no central agreement (some held it teaches a subordination, others, that in ministry as in salvation all are one in Christ). The last word hasn’t yet been said.
There will also be much future discussion about the charismatic movement. Many wanted the congress to endorse neo-Pentecostalism; others hesitated. In the end the congress recognized that the Spirit gives gifts as he wills and commended the whole subject to the church for further study.
On the ecumenical movement, the congress held that evangelicals already have a unity that spans denominational barriers and that should be regarded as truly ecumenical. This kind of unity, the congress said, should be stressed in proposals for closer denominational unity.
LEON MORRIS
The Indefectible Dr. Küng
Four years after an invitation from Trinity College, Melbourne, to Swissborn Catholic theologian Hans Küng to speak at the school’s annual School of Theology, the noted professor was able to come; his visit coincided with the release in Australia of his book Infallible?Not surprisingly, the topic of papal infallibility held sway during his visit.
A disgruntled Roman Catholic commented: “Anglicans would be angry if Catholics brought out a radical Anglican theologian to deliver an attack on basic Anglican principles.”
Capacity audiences—including many Catholics as well as Anglicans and Protestants—attended. Küng asserted that not only can the Pope make errors; he has in fact made them, as have general councils. For good measure Küng suggested the Scriptures also contain errors. He argued for the indefectibility—rather than the infallibility—of the Church: the idea that though it may make mistakes, the Church will not finally fail of God’s purpose for it.
LEON MORRIS
Tycoons In The Temple
In the best tradition of Madison Avenue, radio preacher Carl McIntire last month tweaked the imagination of many Jews and students of Bible prophecy by announcing he will rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem—on fifteen acres at his new Cape Canaveral, Florida, complex.
McIntire refuses to disclose how much it will cost or when construction will begin. Finances of his own splintered organization are sagging, but—despite the arch-separatism he preaches—he may yoke himself to wealthy Jewish businessmen to fund the multi-million-dollar project. Several—including Maryland comptroller Leo
Goldstein—were invited to talks at McIntire’s Cape May, New Jersey, base where a model of the temple was on display (admission price: “a three-dollar donation”). McIntire escorted several others in a private plane to inspect the Florida site. Goldstein, for one, is for the venture. “It’s a great ecumenical idea,” he says. “I’m for anything that will bring people closer together.”
The 26-by-20-foot model is the creation of Lazare and Suzette Halberthal, Jewish refugees from Rumania. The couple spent more than thirty years building the one-fortieth scale model of Herod’s temple. Ten million visitors made it the leading attraction at the Pavilion of Judaism at Expo 67 in Montreal. It will serve as pattern for the full-sized temple in Florida.
After McIntire brought the Halberthals and their model to Cape May on a concession basis he told his radio audience it “is the most important thing ever in our possession.”
Citing Cape Canaveral’s proximity to Disneyworld (fifty miles away in Orlando), McIntire reportedly plans to market the Jerusalem temple nationally as a piggy-back tourist attraction. He already operates double-deck sightseeing buses between the two locations. The temple will be built in conjunction with his proposed biblical museum.
Wcc Racism Grants: Repeat Performance
The World Council of Churches apparently likes being controversial. The ecumenical body allocated another $200,000 to “anti-racist” groups around the world last month. A decision to fund such groups, including African guerrilla fighters, with a like amount a year ago (see October 9, 1970, issue, page 39, and November 20, 1970, issue, page 44), provoked a storm of protest and cost the WCC support from various sources.
The current grant is to twenty-four organizations, nine of which are southern Africa activist “liberation fronts.”
Following its reaction of a year ago, the South African Council of Churches again dissociated itself from the allocations. The largest slice of the grant—$130,000—goes to liberation movements in Rhodesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea-Bissao. The nine southern Africa groups listed as recipients by the WCC office also received money from the council in 1970. The largest individual grants are for $25,000; three groups, including The Peoples’ Movement for the Liberation of Angola, is allocated this amount. But The Revolutionary Government of Angola in Exile turned down its offered grant of $7,500, saying it was a “trap” and that the WCC had become “political.”
New in this allocation are funds to North American organizations. Two sure to evoke controversy are $7,500 grants to Malcolm X Liberation University in North Carolina and to the Southern Election Fund (it supports black political candidates in the South). Cesar Chavez’s California-based United Farm Workers will get a modest $2,500.
The WCC’s Executive Committee, which made the grants during its meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, explained that the basic concept of the special fund “is to assist in the process by which the racially oppressed and powerless people of the world are enabled to become powerful, be self-reliant, and determine for themselves the political and social system under which they want to live.”
The Executive Committee also said the grants are made without any control over how the money is spent.
Meanwhile, McIntire is reminding his followers not to forget the top priority on his agenda: fight Communism. He has scheduled another “Victory March” and rally in Washington, D. C., on October 23 to protest President Nixon’s upcoming visit to Red China.
When Nixon announced he would receive Red Chinese ping pong team members who will tour here, McIntire countered with some ping pong diplomacy of his own. He organized tournaments among Christians on Taiwan and brought a championship team of nine to this country, challenging the United States Table Tennis Association to matches and goading Nixon to invite the Christian team to the White House. The top brass of the USTTA, host for the Red Chinese team, ignored McIntire and ordered members to do likewise, an order that split the USTTA ranks.
McIntire featured the team in protest rallies across the nation; all opponents—including some sharp USTTA players—were defeated.
Last month McIntire and aide James Shaw played ping pong on a table carried in front of the White House, then featured the Taiwan team in exhibition matches in a park across the street. In interviews, the Chinese players indicated they were led to believe they would be playing tournament games before large crowds instead of the impromptu matches in small church-related meetings. They insisted their American visit was an expression of friendship for America and not a protest.
However, twenty Chinese Christian leaders in Taiwan have announced they will visit here to mobilize church support-against Nixon’s China policy. McIntire invited them to share his protest platform on October 23, but they did not immediately respond.
McIntire is claiming that the Communists “murdered ten million Christians” in China and thus should be defeated, not courted.
Deaths
WILLIAM F. ALBRIGHT, 80, a leading biblical archaeologist, scholar, author, and longtime professor at Johns Hopkins University; of a stroke in a Baltimore nursing home (see editorial, page 32).
ROLAND DE VAUX, 68, biblical scholar and archaeologist who, as a French Dominican priest, achieved fame for his part in the discovery, transcription, editing, and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls; in Jerusalem.
VICTOR J. REED, 65, bishop of Oklahoma City-Tulsa, ecumenical leader and critic of the Viet Nam war; of an apparent heart attack in Oklahoma City.
(Actually, there were fewer than four million church members and catechumens when the Communists took over the government. Nearly three million were Roman Catholics. A missionary writing in last month’s Eternity magazine claims that the ranks of evangelical Christianity have in fact doubled since 1950. Many house church groups are thriving, he says.)
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Graham Kicks Off Cowboys
Billy Graham christened the new home of the Dallas Cowboys professional football team last month with a ten-day Greater Southwest Crusade. It was the first public use of the 65,000-seat stadium. Appropriately enough, Cowboy coach Tom Landry, a Methodist known for his evangelical convictions, served as crusade general chairman.
Crowds ranging from 41,300 to 51,200 were on hand for the first five services. A total of more than 7,000 responded to Graham’s invitation during that period.
Among the celebrities who paid a visit were former President and Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson.
The new stadium is located at Irving, Texas, between Dallas and Fort Worth (it is not the stadium selected for use by the Washington Senators baseball club, which is being moved to Texas). The Cowboys were scheduled to play their first game there October 10.
Panorama
Nearly 120 persons gathered at Elmhurst (Illinois) College last month for the first conference of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, a spiritual renewal group within the United Church of Christ. The fellowship is composed mainly of pastors who are disenchanted with secularistic and humanistic trends within the denomination.
Zondervan will release The Jesus Generation by Billy Graham October 29. The book is Graham’s first youth-oriented title in fifteen years.
A youth-led volleyball marathon sponsored by Fall River, Massachusetts, Baptist churches netted $1,250 for a cancer-research fund last month. The game lasted 132 hours and “made people aware that evangelicals are alive and well in Fall River.”
Former Beatle George Harrison’sMy Sweet Lord was voted the best single record of the year last month in both the international and British sections of a poll by the Melody Maker, Britain’s largest-circulation music paper.
An eight-day evangelistic crusade in Gulfport, Mississippi, brought 1,032 professions of faith. Baptist leaders called the interdenominational crusade, led by evangelist James Robison of Fort Worth, “the greatest Christian happening on the Gulf Coast” in recent history.
COCU has a new associate general secretary: the Reverend William C. Larkin, 30, a former district executive of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Larkin succeeds W. Clyde Williams, who has become president of Miles College in Birmingham.
Archbishop Marcus Loane of Sydney, who made headlines during the Pope’s visit to Australia in 1970 by refusing to attend an ecumenical service in which Catholics and most Protestant denominations took part, was in the news again last month when he declined to attend the installation of Catholic Archbishop Freeman of Sydney.
Ben Haden, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, Tennessee, preached in a White House religious service September 12. Billy Graham gave the benediction.
Greek Orthodox primate Archbishop Iakovos baptized the granddaughter of the late Russian dictator, Joseph Stalin, in ceremonies in Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee last month. The child, Olga Peters, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Wesley Peters; Mrs. Peters is the former Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Dr. Paul M. Nagano, pastor of the Japanese Baptist Church in Seattle, has been elected chairman of the newly formed Asian American Baptist Caucus.
World Scene
The first complete Bible concordance in Hausa, the native language of six million and a commercial language for many others in West Africa, is expected to be off the press this fall. Its author is a Southern Baptist missionary who has been in Nigeria since 1948, Bonnie Mae Moore.
Febias College of Bible in Manila has been accredited to grant the bachelor of arts degree. The school, under another name, was established in 1948 as the first project of Far Eastern Gospel Crusade.
The Swedish Ecumenical Council has appealed to the Soviet Union and other Eastern governments to respect freedom of religion in their countries. The council cited “undue interference” by authorities and cautioned against “the lessening of tension by silence.” Nearly 3,000 mainstream Protestant pastors and lay leaders from throughout Korea reportedly descended on Holiness Interdenominational Church in Pusan for an institute conducted by San Diego, California, charismatic evangelist Morris Cerullo, breaking down the church doors and smashing windows in order to gain entry to the packed church.
World Gospel Crusades has completed its Every Creature Crusades in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic; 850,000 homes were reached with Gospels of John. The nondenominational missionary literature agency is planning another crusade in Honduras this winter.
Between 6,000 and 8,000 Honduran villagers were touched with Christian love and the helping hands of Atlanta physicians from Northside Baptist Church during a medical mission program. In one village 1,691 patients were treated, 891 teeth extracted, 1,300 persons heard the Gospel, and 36 decisions were recorded.
A slight, bespectacled, 73-year-old dental technician has established his twenty-seventh church in the Philippines. “I manufacture dentures for a living,” says Urbano Castillo, who averages $85 a year for his dental work, “but my main business is winning souls to Christ.”
Another British religious weekly, the 56,000-circulation Sunday Companion that offered “family reading,” ceases publication this month.
The Baptists in Czechoslovakia have published a new hymnal with 670 hymns, the largest thus far for that country.
British humanists—like British churches—are having membership and financial woes: membership last year fell from more than 4,000 to fewer than 3,000, and the financial deficit increased threefold.
Gospel Films’ High on the Campus, a fifty-two-minute color documentary, will be used by the government of Brazil in its nationwide effort to halt the use of dangerous drugs.
University of Singapore medical students receiving evangelistic training from The Navigators organization say they have witnessed to all the non-Christian medical students in the school. Now they are evangelizing a nearby housing estate of carpenters and masons. Dozens of teen-agers and young adults have become Christians and are engaged in Bible study.
