Hugh Wesley Goodwin, a 54-year-old municipal court judge in Fresno, California, is under investigation for his practice of mixing God and the law.
California’s judicial watchdog commission indicates that Goodwin’s practice of giving some defendants a choice between going to church or going to jail is a violation of the Constitution’s clause on the separation of church and state. The commission also says that he allows religious classes to be held in his chambers (a reference to a Thursday noon Bible-study session for courthouse employees), and it mentions his open support of a Christian candidate for public office. So far, the commissioners have not invited the judge to meet with them.
Despite the probe and all the criticism of him in legal circles and in the press, Goodwin takes pride in the apparent success of his program in dealing with one of society’s pressing problems—rehabilitation of lawbreakers. After his appointment as a judge in February, 1976, Goodwin began giving persons guilty of minor crimes a choice of doing community-service work, paying a fine, going to jail, or attending church services twice a week (he specified that one of the services had to feature study of the Bible). Most who have appeared before him—including a number of habitual offenders—have chosen the religious “sentence.” Of these approximately 200 persons, says the judge, only five have been back in court on subsequent charges. Thus Goodwin sees himself as only a catalyst in the process of helping people to straighten out their own lives through the discovery of moral guidelines and sources of spiritual power.
Offenders are permitted to choose their own church after consultation with friends and relatives, but many ask the judge to pick out one. Goodwin works closely with a number of pastors in town; they are expected to become involved personally in efforts to help the offenders. (The judge denies suggestions that he is proselytizing. He says he would let a Jewish defendant attend a synagogue and a Muslim attend services at a mosque, but so far there apparently have been no such defendants.)
Goodwin maintains that the non-jail option not only helps the individuals involved but also results in big savings to taxpayers: children and other dependents of some offenders are kept off welfare rolls, penal-system expenses are reduced, and people in trouble are provided a place where they can receive “free” counseling and loving care. And some unemployed troublemakers have gotten jobs, thanks to sympathetic church members who contacted prospective employers, he says.
The sentence varies according to the offense. One shoplifter was given this choice: a $200 fine, or ten days in jail, or eighty hours of community work, or ten Bible-study sessions at church. Goodwin believes her case is a crucial one: her children are aware of her habit of stealing, and if she doesn’t change her ways it is likely that the children will follow her example. With God, at least, there’s hope, reasons the judge, himself the father of four. He normally prescribes six months to a year at a church. Many defendants and their relatives have come back later to thank him, he says.
Goodwin doesn’t think that what he is doing violates the Constitution, and he says this belief is shared by the ministers he knows, all of whom are church-and-state separationists. He believes it is wrong to interpret the Constitution “to mean that a man can’t serve the Lord where he is.”
He scoffs at the criticism of the lunchtime Bible-study sessions, which he organized at the suggestion of his boss when he was in the Public Defender’s office. “Girlie magazines are fine, but not the Bible,” he comments wryly.
Goodwin doesn’t see anything wrong, either, in encouraging his ministerial friends to “get behind a candidate who believes in God and get him elected to office.” Such opportunities are rare, says Goodwin, so he is not too concerned about complaints in this area.
The judge’s friends insist he is no crackpot or fanatic. He is soft-spoken and unassuming, they say, a man strongly committed to Christian principles. He holds earned degrees from Harvard and Howard universities. His services are in wide demand as a lecturer on the church and community circuits. He is an active member of Second Baptist Church in Fresno and does some teaching at First Baptist.
As Fresno’s first black attorney (he is married to the city’s first black public-school teacher), Goodwin counseled many poor and disadvantaged people. He organized Fresno-area citizens for the Selma-to-Montgomery Freedom March in Alabama in 1965.
There is pressure for Goodwin’s resignation or removal from office, but he isn’t budging. He predicts his case may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, says he, if his opponents try to remove him, he will use the occasion “as another opportunity to educate them.”
VERNAGENE VOGELZANG and EDWARD E. PLOWMAN
No Room In the Room?
Can religious services be held in publichousing facilities without violating the Constitution’s clause on the separation of church and state?
That is a question that is vexing the board of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA). The issue arose when a nun attached to a nearby Roman Catholic church held three informal, ecumenical worship gatherings and Bible readings at the Pinecrest housing development last year. Most of the 225 elderly residents of the facility apparently approved (half are members of the Catholic parish), but the CMHA issued a formal ban against the occasional services last April.
The nun, Sister Claire Foken, has launched a campaign to reverse the decision, and she has garnered some strong political support.
When congressman Tom Luken complained to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that the senior citizens’ First Amendment rights were being violated, the agency said it had no jurisdiction, but it did warn the CMHA that there may be constitutional problems if religious groups are the only ones denied use of the common room at Pinecrest.
Moreover, Pastor Harold Stockman of Price Hill United Methodist Church inquired at a recent CMHA meeting why Yoga, which he described as “a form of Eastern meditation,” is permitted in the common room but Christianity is not.
CMHA director Henry R. Stefanik, a church-going United Presbyterian, says he would permit worship services at Pinecrest “if we’re legally empowered to do so.” But he also suggested that Pinecrest is not a nursing home and that if residents are too infirm to get to their churches they “may belong in some other residence.”
His comment upset Sister Foken and her friends even worse. “It is not fair to say anyone who can manage a small apartment and use the Pinecrest elevator should be able to walk to church,” she asserted.
Krishna Calling
Seven affiliates of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (popularly known as the Hare Krishna sect) were accused in a $310,000 civil suit of illegally hooking into a private microwave communications system and making thousands of dollars of phone calls that were charged to other persons. The suit was filed in federal court in Los Angeles by MCI Telecommunications Corporation of Washington, D.C. MCI operates a system linking eighteen metropolitan areas. It is used mostly by businesses making extensive out-of-state calls. The firm alleges that the Krishna groups somehow found out the code numbers of subscribers to MCI and how to make and bill long-distance calls. Antiracketeering and fraud statutes were invoked in the suit.
Krishna attorneys had no immediate comment.
An Appeal To The Past
The teacher dismissed by a school in England for his literal interpretation of Genesis (see March 4 issue, page 54) has had his appeal dismissed by an industrial tribunal.
Following the verdict, David Watson, 57, told reporters that the state’s version of religion had now drifted so far away from Christianity as to be virtually worthless in providing any sort of anchor in life for children. “One of the best things that could happen as a result of my case,” said the former head of religious education at a Hertfordshire school, “would be to put the clock back five hundred years and start again: set up Christian schools as they used to be in the past. The schools in this country have become pagan schools and … it is time to think about pulling out.”
He objected to a syllabus which expected him to teach that stories such as those in Genesis were “of course” myth and legend. He denied that he was trying to brainwash the pupils into accepting his own interpretation.
Watson plans now to return to India where he had previously been a missionary, and will teach at a “broad-minded” Christian school.
J. D. DOUGLAS
Give and Take
Political contributions by churches are strictly forbidden by regulations of the Internal Revenue Service. The law was apparently violated by St. Paul Baptist Church in Los Angeles, and as a result the church may lose its status as a tax-exempt organization.
Last spring, the church gave two checks for $1,000 each to fund-raisers for California attorney general Evelle J. Younger’s campaign for the Republication nomination for governor. Younger’s top finance people said they were unaware of any problem created by the donations, and St. Paul’s pastor, John L. Branham, said his church had been contributing to Younger’s campaigns “for years.” It’s “nothing new,” he stated, “and it has no bearing on our tax-exempt status.”
The money was used to purchase $250 tickets to a fund-raising dinner. Tax authorities say that if an investigation shows the church did indeed make political contributions, action—subject to appeal—will be taken to remove it from tax-exempt rolls. This would mean that church members no longer could list contributions to the church as tax deductions, and the church could lose its property tax exemptions.
Mobile Members
Where do new church members come from? And where do departing members go?
Those were answers sought by a recent survey conducted by the 13-million-member Southern Baptist Convention. Many of those who joined a Southern Baptist congregation last year came from within: children or young people who were baptized and voted into membership. Others came from unchurched backgrounds. But 39,000 persons came from other religious groups, and the SBC lost 46,000 of its people to other denominations and faiths, according to the study.
An almost even trade occurred between the SBC and main-line Protestant denominations. The latter provided 79 per cent of those coming into SBC churches, while Catholics accounted for 14 per cent and small Christian “sects” contributed 4.2 per cent. Most SBC gains from the main-line Protestant sector came from Methodists (34 per cent) and Presbyterians (12 per cent). Lutherans and the Assemblies of God were listed at 4.2 per cent each.
The study shows that SBC churches gained four times as many members from Catholic churches as they lost to Catholicism and twelve times as many members from non-Christian faiths, but it also shows that SBC congregations lost about twice as many to small Christian groups as they received from those backgrounds.
War and Grace
Pastor Dean Lueking of the 1,800-member Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois, has been one of the national leaders of the so-called moderate faction in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod opposed to the policies of LCMS president J. A. O. Preus. Rather than continue the conflict, Grace voted 425 to 199 to break ties with the LCMS and become independent as of October. Last month the LCMS notified Grace that it intended to buy back the church property under terms of an option inserted in the sales agreement when the LCMS sold the property to the congregation in 1929. Lueking and the congregational leaders say they have a different understanding of the agreement, and they indicated they would fight to retain their property. The dispute will likely end up in civil court.
The repurchase option was apparently written into the 1929 agreement to ensure that a Missouri Synod congregation would always be on or adjacent to the LCMS’s Concordia Teachers College, whose property adjoins Grace. (Of Concordia’s 1,200 students, estimates of the number of students who attend Grace range from about a dozen to 150. The college has its own chapel.)
According to the agreement, the option to repurchase could be exercised if the parish were to “decide to affiliate, consolidate, or merge” with an organization not part of the LCMS, or if the congregation were to “fail or decide not to teach or preach the Scriptures” in accord with the LCMS constitution.
In order to avoid the option problem, the congregation—on advice of legal counsel—voted to become independent when it split from the LCMS rather than to affiliate with the American Lutheran Church or the breakaway 200-congregation Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, which is composed mostly of former LCMS members. Lueking has been close to both groups.
The LCMS has offered about $750,000 for Grace’s property. This is approximately $100,000 more than its appraised value, according to an LCMS official. Parish leaders, however, said recently that replacement cost of the buildings alone would be “in the multi-million-dollar range.”
Battling The Absolutists
More than 200 religious ethicists last month issued a “call to concern” opposing “the absolutist position that it is always wrong to terminate a pregnancy at any time after conception.” Their statement called abortion a “serious and sometimes tragic procedure for dealing with fetal life,” but it also stated belief that “abortion may in some instances be the most loving act possible.” It went on to challenge “the heavy institutional involvement of the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in a campaign to enact religiously based anti-abortion commitments into law.”
At a press conference in Washington,
D.C., where the statement was released, Protestant church leaders said it was not intended to be anti-Catholic or to deny anyone’s legal rights to speak out on an issue. But, said Dean J. Philip Wogaman of Wesley Seminary, “it is inappropriate for one group to seek to employ the power of the state to enforce its views.”
Religion in Transit
The U.S. Supreme Court last month let stand state tuition-grant programs for students at church-related colleges and universities in Tennessee and North Carolina.
Southern Baptist-related Wake Forest University recently received a $300,000 federal grant for buildings, equipment, and salaries for its biology department. North Carolina Baptist Convention policy, however, forbids affiliated schools to accept government funds unless they cover services rendered by the schools. A denominational committee has been investigating. Its preliminary recommendations: return the amount considered to be for capital improvements. The school wants to keep the money.
The California Teachers Association and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit in Los Angeles challenging the constitutionality of a state program that lends textbooks to non-public schools (most are Catholic schools).
Evangelist Oral Roberts announced plans to build a $100 million health center that will combine medical expertise with prayer. The complex, to be called the City of Faith Medical and Research Center, will be housed in three large structures, one of them sixty stories high, on an eighty-acre site in Tulsa. Included will be a 777-bed hospital and a medical and dental school. An estimated staff of 5,000, including 300 physicians and surgeons, will be required to maintain it, estimates Roberts. He hopes to have the complex debt-free when it opens in 1981. (His evangelistic association reported income of $20.7 million in 1974, the latest figures available. More than $6 million was given to Oral Roberts University, down $2 million from the amount given in 1973.)
The multi-million-dollar, thirty-five-acre Southern Keswick Bible-conference center in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been given to the Chicago-based Moody Bible Institute. The complex includes a 60-student Christian school (kindergarten through high school) and two radio stations. C. W. “Bill” Caldwell, Southern Keswick’s president, will stay on as manager of the stations. (Prior to the transfer, Moody owned and operated seven radio stations in four states.)
A $600,000 lawsuit has been filed in Des Moines against the Meredith Corporation by six persons dismissed by the printing firm in 1975 for refusing to work on sex-oriented magazines because of their religious beliefs. The six, who are seeking damages and reinstatement with back pay, contend the publications contained “repugnant” and “pornographic” material. They insist that their beliefs could have been “reasonably accommodated” if they had been assigned to work elsewhere in the plant.
Christian Broadcasting Network has announced that it will launch a major school to be known as CBN University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Graduate schools of communications and theology are to be established first, followed by graduate schools of business and law, according to the network’s founder-president, M. G. “Pat” Robertson.
Catholic Relief Services—the aid and development arm of Roman Catholics in the United States—provided food, medicine, clothing, and other assistance valued at $240.3 million over the past fiscal year, according to a CRS report. This aid, said the report, reached some 18 million persons in eighty-five countries.
First the good news: a random sampling indicates that the amount of money received by Christian colleges from alumni and other sources was significantly higher in the past school year than in the previous year, according to Christian College News Service. This reflects a national trend. Now the bad news: in many cases, inflation has outpaced the giving and donor dollars today buy up to 25 per cent less than what they did between 1972 and 1976. Meanwhile, an unofficial survey shows that enrollment at Christian colleges is generally ahead of that a year ago, while enrollments at most secular schools have remained steady.
A New York City health department report shows that 30 per cent of the nearly 110,000 babies born in New York City in 1976 were born out of wedlock, almost three times the rate recorded twenty years ago.
Representatives of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, a pro-abortion alliance of eleven major Protestant, Jewish, and humanist organizations, issued a complaint against President Carter. They said he has met “repeatedly” with Catholic officials on the abortion issue but refuses to meet with their agency. All they want to do, they said, is to make known their various theological viewpoints on the issue and to support his opposition to a constitutional amendment that would all but ban abortions. Abortion is basically a theological issue, they said, and “it must not become a matter of civil law.”
A Bucks County, Pennsylvania, judge turned down Robert B. Graham’s attempt to use religion to obtain a property-tax exemption for his home. Graham, who received a mail-order ordination certificate from the Universal Life Church in Modesto, California, decribed his house as a meeting place for the Holland Universal Life Church of Love. The judge, however, said it was “merely a haven for disgruntled taxpayers.”
Prison Fellowship, a two-year-old ministry spearheaded by Charles Colson (Born Again), is functioning in thirty of the nation’s 600 state and federal prisons, according to press reports. It relies on more than 1,000 volunteer workers. A computer helps to match community volunteers with inmates seeking assistance. One experimental feature of the program provides for selected prisoners to be released for several weeks to participate in spiritual training sessions. These have been highly successful so far, says a Colson aide. Colson himself is in demand as a speaker at inmate gatherings in prisons across the country.
Personalia
John R. Dellenback, immediate past director of the Peace Corps and a four-term Republican congressman from Oregon before that, was elected president of the six-year-old Christian College Consortium, based in Washington, D.C. He was also elected president of the Christian College Coalition, an alliance that includes the fourteen evangelical colleges in the consortium and twenty-one other Christian schools. Both positions are executive posts.
Everett Graffam announced he will retire in July as the top executive officer of the World Relief Commission, the relief arm of the National Association of Evangelicals. Jerry P. Ballard, a management consultant from Atlanta, has been named to succeed him.
Royal L. Peck, a missionary educator in Italy for twenty-two years with Greater Europe Mission, was appointed executive director of Christ’s Mission, a New Jersey-based agency that specializes in ministry to Roman Catholics. He succeeds the retiring Stuart P. Garver. Peck plans to expand the mission’s work to include church-planting projects overseas. Its publication, Christian Heritage, will be continued.
New presidents: John Dillenberger, a
United Church of Christ minister and seminary teacher, to Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut; Stanley E. Letcher, Jr., a minister of the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ (instrumental), to Midwest Christian College in Oklahoma City; and Jesse Fletcher, pastor of the 3,900-member First Baptist Church of Knoxville, Tennessee, to Hardin-Simmons University, a Southern Baptist school in Abilene, Texas.
Herman E. Van Schuyver, an administrator in the Christian school movement, was named director of the National Association of Christian Schools, an affiliate of the National Association of Evangelicals.
Charles Templeton, a prominent Canadian evangelist in the 1950s who turned his back on the faith and took up secular pursuits, has written a novel with a religious theme and title: Act of God (McClelland and Stewart). The plot is built on an archeologist’s discovery in Israel of the bones of Jesus.
Joni (pronounced Johnny) Eareckson was 17 when her spinal cord was severed in a diving accident in Maryland in 1967. Paralyzed from the neck down, she overcame bitter depression with the help of God and friends, and she learned how to write and draw by holding a pencil in her mouth. Now her sketches are found on greeting cards and prints in bookstores across the country. They are signed “Joni-PTL” (for “Praise the Lord”). Some 150,000 copies of her biography, Joni (Zondervan), are in print. World Wide Pictures, an affiliate of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, plans to produce a movie about her for release in theaters across the country.
World Scene
Under the banner, “National Evangelization Crusade 1977,” hundreds of thousands of South Korean Christians recently gathered on Seoul’s Yoido Island for four days of singing, preaching, and prayer. All thirty-two of Korea’s Protestant denominations were represented at the event, which commemorated a spiritual revival that began in Pyongyang (now the capital of North Korea) seventy years ago. Leaders predicted all of Korea will someday be evangelized, resulting in reunification of the country. But they also spoke fearfully about the planned withdrawal of U.S. troops and the danger of attack by North Korean forces.
Bibles: The Cuban government told the United Bible Societies it will permit importation of 5,000 Bibles and New Testaments for distribution by local Protestant churches; the Polish Bible Society reports that by the end of this year 200,000 copies of a new translation of the Bible into Polish—the first Polish translation since 1400—will have been printed in that land; Southern Baptists are distributing 25,000 Bibles throughout the Philippines, and the American Bible Society has supplied 10,000 Bibles, 40,000 New Testaments, and other literature to the committee planning the Billy Graham crusade slated for Manila, November 23 to 27.
Operation Mobilization, an international evangelistic agency specializing in the use of short-term missionaries, has been able to carry the Gospel to many “closed” areas with its 2,300-ton shipLogos. Book exhibits for the public (often attracting thousands of people per day) and conferences for pastors and other Christian workers are scheduled while the vessel is in port, and crew member-missionaries fan out to witness and distribute Christian literature. Now the group hopes to add another ship to its ministry. Leaders were looking at a 6,800-ton Italian liner last month (fuel consumption: thirteen tons per day).
Israeli police reported that about thirty ultra-Orthodox Jewish zealots vandalized the home of seven Americans who describe themselves as “Jewish disciples of Christ.” The Americans had received publicity in an Israeli television report on the village in Galilee where they live.
A translation of the Gospel of Matthew in Gheg, a dialect of modern Albania, was published by the United Bible Societies. It contains special helps for Muslim readers. Albania has banned the Bible and outlawed all religion, so 15,000 copies of the Scripture portion have been published in Yugoslavia for distribution among the one million Albanians who live there.
Nine Latin Americans identifying themselves as “leaders” of two evangelical student groups in Central America—autonomous units of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship—have called for active support of the proposed new Panama Canal treaty in an “Open Letter to Christians in North America.” Their appeal expresses “shock” at the “opposition of so many” Americans to the turnover of the canal. “You stole it,” they asserted. A mission executive says none of the nine is a staff member of either group, making the letter an unofficial one.
The average British clergyman’s salary is only $4,250 per year, but a magazine that conducted a survey on job satisfaction concluded that British ministers as a class are the men most satisfied with their jobs. Nearly 60 per cent of the clergy among 24,000 persons polled said they were “very satisfied” in their work, and 86 per cent said they would choose the same occupation again. The most miserable workers, according to the survey, were draftsmen. Only 8 per cent said they were happy in their jobs.
