NEWS
Will COCU (the Consultation on Church Union) ever become COCU (the Church of Christ Uniting)?
The prognosis may be quite discernible by June 1, the deadline for the nine denominations belonging to COCU to register their official responses to the first draft of a plan of union. The plan seeks to unite the twenty-four million members of the denominations into one church.
Early returns indicate that the consultation is in deep trouble. The executive committee of the two-million-member United Church of Christ (UCC), the first to respond to the plan, raised eight “major questions.” The committee said there is strong feeling among the rank and file against “hierarchical and pyramidal structures.” UCC members insisted that more emphasis be placed on the local church, and that the right of local congregations to hold property be seriously discussed. Overall, the response of the UCC—one of the most enthusiastic backers of COCU in the past—was cool.
COCU’s associate director William C. Larkin, a Christian Methodist Episcopal minister, said black denominations will “want to see some clear evidence of representation and compensatory treatment before they sign over their property.”
Episcopal bishop Ned Cole of Syracuse complained that the plan devoted too much space to structure and not enough to doctrine, and he said he disliked the heavy emphasis on racial concerns.
Many of the petitions presented by local churches to this month’s United Methodist convention call for Methodist withdrawal from COCU.
COCU got its start twelve years ago in San Francisco when Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake called for formation of such a plan, but even he has shown disinterest in recent years.
Indeed, Methodist theologian Albert C. Outler, a COCU participant from the beginning, sees a “severe slump” in ecumenical interest among Protestants. He blames leaders of the member denominations for COCU’s plight. “They are obsessed with organization, structure, power, and control,” he alleges. He expects a flood of negative reactions to the COCU plan from local congregations and members.
COCU general secretary Paul A. Crow described the ecumenical mood as one of “pessimism and paralysis.” Christians are “on the verge of ghoulishness, a neurotic delight in finding no hope for any ideas, proposals, institutions, or persons,” he declared bitterly at a recent Texas meeting.
COCU isn’t the only unhappy ecumenical scene. Cracks are appearing in the National Council of Churches fellowship. There is deep division between leaders on the Arab-Israeli situation, and abortion has become a bone of contention also. Although many NCC member denominations have taken stands on abortion, the council itself has not—primarily to keep peace with the anti-abortion Orthodox wing of the family. But a statement is due out of committee in June. Insiders say that the committee is split but that the majority pro-abortion element will have its way, setting up a struggle of sorts among NCC delegates—with the spectacle of Roman Catholics, recently courted by another NCC committee, observing from the sidelines.
There is also evidence of growing friction between Christian activists and Jews (see following stories).
Thus ecumenism seems to be grinding to a standstill. Comments COCU’s Crow: “I’m ready to move in any direction the Church is willing to commit itself. The real danger is not that we make a bad decision but that we make no decision.”
Cops And Bibles
Police chief Donald Wolford of Spencer, Iowa, believes that “when anyone has a complete reversal of character from one week to the next there is something wrong with him.” The man he has in mind is officer Kenneth Trevithick, 25, a formerly foul-mouthed boozer who got converted while vacationing in California.
Trevithick came back to work with a Bible and plenty of Jesus-talk for speechless fellow officers. No profanity. No booze.
Wolford suspended him for alleged “disobedience of orders” and “failure to properly perform duties.” But the Civil Service Commission reinstated him, scolding the city for improperly obtaining reports of his mental condition.
The commission then ordered a new brief suspension, saying the policeman should have obeyed an order not to read the Bible while on duty.
Trevithick concedes he may have been a little too zealous on the job.
The Rabbis Aren’T Smiling
So many Jews are wearing “that smile” nowadays!
Full page ads proclaiming that message appeared in ten of the nation’s largest daily newspapers (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times). But the rabbis aren’t among those smiling. The ads show a group of beaming Jewish Christians who have become happy and even “more Jewish” by acknowledging “the Great Jew [Jesus] as the Messiah.” Readers are invited to send for the testimonies of the happy people.
The first week brought 4,000 replies to the New York headquarters of the American Board of Missions to the Jews (ABMJ), sponsor of the ads, and inquiries have been pouring in steadily, according to the ABMJ. The mission says it spent $70,000 on the evangelistic ad campaign. A number of churches plan to sponsor ads in other newspapers, and ABMJ staffers may be kept busy opening their mail.
“We get nice letters from grassroots Jews,” says a veteran ABMJ worker, adding she has never before seen Jewish people “so open to the Gospel.” But, says she, letters from Jewish officials—including rabbis—are not so nice.
That may be the understatement of the year. In fact, rabbis are lashing out angrily against Jewish evangelism—and against members of their own flocks who embrace Jesus.
Last month the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Youth Council invited ABMJ staffer Martin “Moishe” Rosen to address a convention seminar on why Jews are turning to Jesus. Nearly all the 160 conferees crowded into Rosen’s seminar, forcing cancellation of other workshops. After several hours had passed, leaders ordered Rosen and a handful of “Jews for Jesus” members (see December 17, 1971, issue, page 33) off the premises so that the conference could continue.
A short time later the Northern California Board of Rabbis huddled to discuss the impact of the Christian movement. The rabbis emerged with a statement deploring invitations by Jewish groups to Christian spokesmen. They also leveled an attack at the “Jews for Jesus”: “We do not deny them the right to their aberration, but we can insist that there be no misunderstanding about the nature of this group as having no relationship whatsoever to Jewish religious sentiment.”
Their statement went on to say there are “few intolerances inherent in our Jewish tradition. Only one version of it has remained constant. It is toward those who have turned away from our religious heritage in favor of another religion.”
Reportedly, the rabbis came up with a plan to counter “Jews for Jesus”: avoid giving publicity to the movement, increase emphasis on a personal God in their own teachings, increase biblical content in curricula materials. (Young people are noticeably absent from most synagogue services. Meanwhile, a sizable number of young Jews are surfacing in the Jesus movement.)
Rosen responded with a salvo of his own: large ads in San Francisco newspapers heralding, “What the rabbis don’t want the Jewish community to hear.” Readers were invited to send for Rosen’s report on why young Jews are turning to Christ.
In an interview Rosen said, “The rabbis want to keep the lid on because in their defense against Christ they have been promoting the myth that Christianity is responsible for contemporary anti-Semitism. This has produced resentment and hostility among Jews toward Christians, and the rabbis don’t want the extent of that resentment and hostility to become known.”
This month a Massachusetts Rabbinical Court of Justice ruled that a person born to Jewish parents who joins the “Hebrew-Christians” movement abdicates “his right as a member of the Jewish faith,” but that such a person “may not at any time be exempt from responsibilities which membership in the Jewish faith imposes upon him by divine revelation clearly defined in the written and oral law.”
The court also held that a Hebrew Christian may not marry a member of the Jewish congregation and may not have the right of burial in a Jewish cemetery. “By trying to snatch Jewish souls, these evangelical groups are only fanning the fires of hatred and revulsion,” says Southern California rabbi Shimon Paskow. “Enough people have died in the name of Christian love and it is high time to stop this nonsense.”
Rabbis aren’t alone in their criticism of Jewish evangelism. Temple University religion professor Franklin Littell, president of Christians Concerned for Israel, says the ABMJ’s smiling-people ad shows “a shocking degree of insensitivity.” In light of “the Holocaust,” he asserts, “Christianity has no right to verbal missions to the Jews. It had better spend its time and money proving its credibility through actions of goodwill toward Jewish people and Israel.”
During Passover season the ABMJ succeeded in getting its controversial Passover telecast on forty stations in Canada and seventeen in the United States. (Last year a number of stations banned it.) A Miami station offered free time for a confrontation between the ABMJ and Jewish leaders, but the Jews failed to show up and the ABMJ got the entire time to present its case.
One thing is clear: Soviet Jewry isn’t the only topic attracting interest in the Jewish community these days.
EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
Anti-Semitism … Or Mere Criticism
A two-page Palm Sunday sermon in which Dean Francis Sayre, Jr., of the Washington National Cathedral mentioned the plight of Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem brought charges of anti-Semitism from Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The Washington Post accused Sayre of coming “painfully close to a very old, very familiar line of the worst bigotry.” Executive secretary for Catholic-Jewish relations Edward H. Flannery and Monsignor George G. Higgins submitted a joint protest letter to the editor of the Post. Rabbi Judah A. Cahn, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith executive, also expressed harsh disapproval of Sayre.
Defending Dean Sayre at a press conference organized by John Richardson of the American Near East Relief Association, editor A. C. Forrest of the United Church Observer, official periodical of the United Church of Canada, said, “I congratulate Dean Sayre [for having] the courage, knowledge, and insight to speak prophetically about one of the most disturbing situations in the world today.” Forrest is well known for his pro-Arab position.
The controversy, said press panelist Jesuit Joseph L. Ryan, has brought about a “great ecumenical defeat.” It also raises the question, he added, of the definition of anti-Semitism. It cannot mean mere criticism of the Israeli government, he said.
Sayre’s sermon accused the Israelis of oppressing the Arab population. Citing a recent Christianity and Crisis article on Israeli policies by anti-Zionist Jew Israel Shahak, Sayre asserted: “Arabs are deported; Arabs are imprisoned without charge; Arabs are deprived of the patrimony of their lands.”
Counter-accusations of distortion and inaccuracy like those from a Jerusalem citizen identified as A. Gronman, Presbyterian executive Graydon E. McClellan, and visiting Israeli professor Harold Fisch brought no direct response from the dean. An aide, however, said Sayre refused to repudiate any of his sermon.
Richardson labeled the press conference “an attempt to find the facts” in the Arab-Israeli dispute over Jerusalem. Both Ryan and Forrest, who have traveled widely in the Middle East, cited statistics indicating Israeli oppression. Forrest accused Israel of violating the fourth Geneva Convention and quoted a Middle East source who said there is a “calculated attempt to eliminate any identifiable Palestinian group.” He also cited United Nations reports on the Jerusalem issue, charging that Sayre’s accusations “are kind of old stuff to anyone who’s done his homework or traveled in the Middle East.”
One member of the audience, Norton Merzvinsky, an anti-Zionist Jew who sponsored Shahak on a recent visit to this country, offered members of the press articles from leading Israeli papers (Maariv, Haaretz, and Yediot Aharonot) that substantiated Shahak’s specific indictments. Merzvinsky added that the Jerusalem Post, the English paper in Israel, includes only sporadic coverage of Arab persecution by the Jews.
CHERYL A. FORBES
Nixon And Church Schools
Opponents of tax aid for parochial schools took heart this month from President Nixon’s speech before the annual convention of the National Catholic Educational Association in Philadelphia. He vowed to “find ways” to help non-public schools but added, “I will not make promises which cannot be kept, nor raise hopes which will later be disappointed.… I feel the only responsible way to proceed is to take the extra time required to guarantee that the legislative recommendations which we finally submit will be equitable, workable, and constitutional.”
Americans United for Separation of Church and State interpreted Nixon’s remarks as a backing away from parochaid. The group said the speech retreated from what he told a Knights of Columbus meeting last August and noted also: “Apparently Mr. Nixon had listened to advisors urging caution on any parochaid commitment at this time.”
