When a panel of four officers of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC) last month released $85,000 to the guerrilla groups fighting against an interim settlement in Rhodesia, a storm broke over their heads. The most common allegation: The WCC is financing terrorism.
The money, which came from a special fund of the WCC’s Programme to Combat Racism (PCR), had been allocated more than a year ago to the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), a black coalition led by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo. Because of uncertainties, the WCC executive committee asked the officers to study the situation before releasing the funds.
The officers: Archbishop Edward Scott of Toronto (WCC Central Committee moderator), Jean Skuse of Sydney, Australia, and Catholicos Karekin II of Antelias, Lebanon (vice-moderators), and Philip Potter (general secretary).
In an explanatory statement, the WCC noted that “since March the [Rhodesian] regime has vastly increased the scale of its aggression and oppression against those who oppose the settlement, both internally and outside the country.” It dismissed the stepped up terrorist activities—attributed largely to the Patriotic Front—as an inevitable consequence of the government’s “aggression.”
The PCR grant was earmarked for humanitarian purposes only—food, health, social, educational, and agricultural programs. WCC people acknowledge that they have no sure means of checking how the money is used. But, said one WCC official, “We don’t believe the money will be used to buy guns. We have known the Patriotic Front for many years, and we believe they are responsible people.”
An unidentified spokesman for the Patriotic Front in Lusaka, Zambia, welcomed the PCR grant as recognition of “the legitimacy of the armed struggle and our need for material as well as moral assistance.”
Patriotic Front members have been accused of recent massacres of white missionaries, farmers, and black villagers (see July 21 issue, page 42). However, William Howard, a black American Baptist who works for the Reformed Church in America and serves as chairman of the PCR commission, said that WCC officials did not feel there was enough hard evidence to prove the accusations. (Indeed, even some arch foes of the Patriotic Front attribute many of the deaths to small roving bands of hoodlums not tied to any of the major political groups.)
Attacks on the PCR are hardly new. There have been plenty since it was begun eight years—and $2.6 million—ago. This time, though, some of the sharpest criticism is coming from people who have supported the council and the PCR. Part of the reason for the perplexity is that two black church leaders joined Prime Minister Ian Smith in forging an interim government. They are United Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa and clergyman Ndabaningi Sithole, a minister of the United Church of Christ who received his theological training at Andover Newton seminary near Boston. Both are highly respected in their denominations.
The grant “pits black against black,” criticized Lois Miller, an executive of the world ministries division of the United Methodist Church. A former member of the WCC Central Committee, she gave the WCC officers a passing grade on intent, but commented, “I do think they made a mistake this time.” By choosing one side, she said, the WCC “is making a political statement,” instead of aiding needy people on humanitarian grounds. “It’s going to hurt them,” she predicted. “We’ve got people asking us to withdraw from the WCC.”
United Methodist bishop Ralph T. Alton of Indiana, who sits on the WCC’s 125-member Central Committee, echoed her remarks. He disclosed that he had fired off a note to Philip Potter questioning the manner in which the decision was made. The grant, he said, was “not according to the policies established in the WCC in situations of political conflict where church leadership was involved on both sides.”
Other leaders were quoted in United Methodist publications as endorsing the WCC action, and there were indications last month that a major confrontation on the issue was shaping up in that denomination (see following story).
Some light was shed on the background of the grant by Annette Hutchins-Felder, who was quoted in a United Methodist news release. Ms. Hutchins-Felder, a staff member of the embattled Women’s Division of the United Methodist Church, serves on the PCR commission, which recommended the grant to the WCC’s officers. She said that the commission had two options at its May meeting: the United African National Council (the interim government) or the Patriotic Front.
“After the commission heard Philip Potter’s analysis of the situation based on a fact-finding visit … it was felt the UANC was no longer involved in the liberation movement,” she explained. “It was part of the government, while other groups were still seeking majority rule. To give money to a government was not in keeping with what PCR stood for.” The commission, she said, “decided the Patriotic Front was still trying to get the best settlement for all the people.”
Leaders of the United Church of Christ, a denomination in the ecumenical forefront, called for “a review” of the grant. “It is not obvious,” they said in a carefully worded statement, that the grant “really serves very well the democratic goals” of the PCR. The paper also criticized the WCC for failing to consult “the church constituency within Zimbabwe or elsewhere in the World Council of Churches family.” A staff member of the New York office of the WCC acknowledged that complaints have been piling up there from denominations and individuals alike.
One of the most stunning reactions came with the announcement of the Salvation Army that it was “suspending” its membership in the WCC “pending further inquiries.” The Army said that it has never contributed funds to the PCR and that it has always opposed violence. (Two British women who taught at a Salvation Army girls’ school in Rhodesia were shot to death by guerrillas in June.) Many WCC executives, including Potter, were away on vacation at the time of the announcement and were unavailable for immediate comment. A news release by Potter’s top aide commended the Army “for the care in which it announced its decision.” It praised the London-based group’s past involvement in the WCC, saying it has “served ecumenism well.”
Fireworks erupted toward the end of the world Anglican Communion’s Lambeth Conference at Canterbury (see story, page 50). Bishop Patrick Rodger of Manchester, England, a former staff member of the WCC, moved that Anglican churches “reaffirm their support and strengthen their understanding” of the WCC. The 440 bishops approved the motion with a show of hands, but not before some angry speeches were made against the WCC grant.
Bishop Gray Temple of South Carolina asked how Anglicans can “come down on one side of a very explosive issue,” and he said that “it will be very difficult for us to explain this to our people.” John Burrough, British bishop of a Rhodesian diocese, said that the WCC grant should go not to the Patriotic Front but to help black children abducted by the front’s guerrillas.
Bishop Addison Hosea of Lexington, Kentucky, told the conference that the grant “typifies an activity that many of our people regret, and they won’t like hearing that $85,000 is very little money.” He was referring to a remark by Episcopalian Cynthia Wedel of Alexandria, Virginia, one of six WCC presidents and a consultant at Lambeth. She said that the WCC fund “is a tiny side program of one unit of the WCC and is supported entirely by special gifts given for the program, and not from the grants of Anglican churches for the entire work of the WCC.”
In London, Christian Aid, the powerful and wealthy relief agency of the British Council of Churches, disassociated itself from the WCC’s action. Although the agency has never provided funds to the PCR, it has supported many other WCC programs. Director Kenneth Slack, worried that “some of our supporters may be confused,” stated that the WCC grant “gives direct church support to the Patriotic Front at a time when its individual acts of violence have deeply distressed many who are eager to see justice established in Rhodesia.” He pledged continued aid to “the victims of the struggle” and “in the development work that will be needed in a free Zimbabwe.”
A WCC statement defending the grant contended that Rhodesia’s internal settlement of the majority-rule issue “leaves the illegal white minority regime still in effective control and gives it a veto over real change for the next decade.” (The settlement contains provisions for democratic elections and a majority government by year’s end, though with special concessions to whites, including temporary control of security forces and certain public services.)
In West Germany, the Protestant Working Group of the Christian Democratic Party charged that the grant “shows in a frightening way the incredible, irresponsible and pharisaic behavior of the [WCC] toward accusations of violations of human rights in southern Africa.”
The Evangelical Church in Germany (West Germany’s state Lutheran church) criticized such a move even before the grant was announced. “We do not feel able to support the [anti-racism program], for we believe that the word of the Bible forbids the church to support the use of violence either directly or indirectly,” said church leaders in a statement released earlier in the summer. At the same time, they cautioned German Lutherans against regarding liberation movements in southern Africa the same as terrorist groups in Germany.
Shortly before the latest grant was announced, forty members of Christian groups in Britain, West Germany, the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand met in London and formed the International Christian Network (ICN).
German Lutheran Peter Beyerhaus, a missions educator at Tubingen and stern critic of ecumenism, was elected ICN chairman.
Through mobilization and coordination of church members, the group hopes to stop “the alarming erosion of biblical standards of doctrine, morals, and social order in the churches throughout the world.” One of its targets: the PCR. The group called upon Philip Potter to take steps to abandon the program or to resign as WCC general secretary. “Failing such action,” the group warned, it would call upon member churches of the WCC to withdraw from the world body.
Normally, the formation of such a dissident group as ICN would have received little attention, but in the present climate it may loom as a thunderhead in a not too distant gathering storm whose fury the WCC must yet endure.
Methodist Civil War
Another front recently opened in the Rhodesian conflict—not in a faraway forested border region, but within the United Methodist Church (UMC) in the United States. Methodist bishop Abel T. Muzorewa of Rhodesia and the Women’s Division of the UMC fought it out last month behind the scenes and in public print.
During a visit to America to seek an end to U.S. sanctions against his country, the bishop lambasted the UMC unit’s criticism of Rhodesia’s “internal” solution toward achieving majority rule. His remarks were addressed to U.S. Methodists in a special message published in regional editions of the United Methodist Reporter.
Muzorewa, 53, is the leader of the United African National Council, one of the major black parties that agreed to the internal settlement, and he is one of the four members on the Executive Council of the interim government. The other three members are United Church of Christ minister Ndabaningi Sithole, tribal chief Jeremiah Chirau (both are black moderates), and Prime Minister Ian Smith. Reputedly representing 90 per cent of the country’s 6.5 million blacks and 250,000 whites, they are to hold power until elections are held, presumably in December, when Rhodesia is to become known officially as Zimbabwe.
Four years ago the bishop was forced into exile as a result of his struggle for majority rule. At one point he endorsed violence as a means to get it. Last fall he helped to negotiate a settlement designed to bring about a peaceful transfer of power. “It is the fulfillment of what I’ve been fighting Ian Smith for all these years,” he declared in his special message. “Who would want the killing to continue?”
The UMC women’s unit did not see it his way. In a resolution last April, the women described the settlement as “peace without justice,” and they warned that it might instead lead to warfare among the blacks themselves. The resolution stated that a “viable solution must include all parties”—an implied objection to the absence of parties led by guerrilla leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe.
Muzorewa replied that the guerrilla leaders had chosen “to exclude themselves” and earlier had acted to “frustrate any efforts toward democracy, peace, and order.” He said that the women’s group had been misled by an “ill-informed and fanatical [female] supporter” of Nkomo and the Patriotic Front coalition with Mugabe. He did not name her.
In a response to the bishop’s charges, however, president Mai H. Gray of the Women’s Division said that Muzorewa was referring to Mia Adjali, the executive secretary of the divisions office at the United Nations. Ms. Adjali had charged that the bishop had his own political interests at heart when he entered into the settlement. President Gray defended Ms. Adjali’s integrity and the division’s decision-making process that led to the resolution. She also implied that the unit would not reconsider the measure, as the bishop had requested in his published remarks. Ms. Gray also reaffirmed her group’s support for black majority rule, and she expressed hope for a peaceful transition.
During his trip to America, Muzorewa visited Washington at the invitation of Republican senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose recent move to lift the sanctions against Rhodesia was rejected in the Senate by only six votes. Helms has often been associated with conservative churchmen and causes. He is a Southern Baptist.
More trouble awaited Muzorewa upon his return home. Some members of his political party complained that the bishop had lost touch with the people. They called for a conference to elect new party leadership, but their move was overwhelmingly defeated at a meeting of party representatives. Six persons were expelled from the party, including three clergymen (a United Methodist, a Presbyterian who served as the party’s secretary for natural resources, and an Anglican who formerly served as the party treasurer).
For a time it appeared that Muzorewa and the three other top people in the interim government—including Smith—would show up at a missions conference at the fundamentalist Church of Christian Liberty in the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights. The church’s pastor, Paul D. Lindstrom, had invited the Rhodesians to speak on the future of Christian missions in their country. Lindstrom told reporters that the invitation was accepted by telephone, and he asked the U.S. State Department to help with preparations, causing embarrassment and some hurried shuffling in government circles. There were indications that Smith might be refused entry under conditions of the U.S. boycott against Rhodesia. Next, Lindstrom announced quietly that the visit—set for July 29—had been postponed because of schedule conflict.
Lindstrom, who once threatened to lead an army of mercenaries to free American soldiers held captive in Viet Nam, said that the Rhodesians had granted permission to his church to reopen its Emmanuel Mission in their country. It had been closed because of terrorist activities. The pastor told reporters that Viet Nam veterans would be dispatched to the mission to protect the missionaries and medical teams.
Messages To Methodists
Evangelicals are becoming more visible—and vocal—in the United Methodist Church. Major issues that have surfaced recently in the UMC are part of the reason. UMC publications last month paid major attention to meetings and pronouncements of the unofficial evangelical caucus in the denomination known as Good News. There were these developments:
• the Good News board formally protested the reappointment of an avowed homosexual pastor to his New York parish, and it requested the UMC’s bishops to petition the denomination’s Judicial Council for a declaratory decision on whether practicing homosexuals can serve as pastors.
• the Evangelical Missions Council, one of twelve Good News task forces, called for the resignation of the Women’s Division staff of the UMC global ministries unit for opposing Rhodesia’s interim government, one of whose leaders is UMC bishop Abel Muzorewa (see preceding story).
• the board lashed out at the treatment of evangelicals and evangelical concerns in UMC seminaries.
• the caucus sponsored two convocations that attracted 1,100 persons to help lay groundwork for a greater evangelical presence and influence at the UMC’s 1980 General Conference. (Three issues were flagged: the ordination of admitted homosexuals, the church’s financial system, and the need for church extension.)
At the center of the homosexual ordination issue is minister Paul Abels of Washington Square United Methodist Church in New York City. Abels, a Drew seminary graduate, has been at Washington Square since 1973. He was quoted a year ago in newspapers in connection with a story about a “covenant” service he performs as a sort of marriage rite for homosexual couples, and he also discussed his own homosexuality.
Bishop W. Ralph Ward Jr., of the UMC’s New York area, and his cabinet recommended against Abels’s reappointment as pastor (UMC pastors serve on a yearly basis), but the majority of the ministerial members of the area UMC conference rejected the recommendation. (Fewer than half of the conference’s 700 ministerial members were present for the voting, according to some pastors who attended the closed session.) Additionally, Abels’s parishioners asked that he be permitted to remain rather than be put on leave of absence, as Ward had proposed. The conference also turned down a recommendation that the question of appointability be referred to the Judicial Council, the UMC’s supreme court. Ward then acceded to the majority opinion.
The Good News board added its voice to the ensuing outcry throughout the denomination. In a letter to Ward, it expressed “profound astonishment and regret” at the action and urged that it be rescinded. “The spirit and letter of our Book of Discipline [church law] are presently being violated,” declared the board, and it called for “an immediate end … to this moral scandal.”
Ward, however, says that the UMC constitution contains no absolute dictum about homosexuality and the ministry. The issue, he says, rests with the UMC’s Social Principles code, and he says that he is “not sure whether the Social Principles are law.” The code, as adopted by the UMC in 1972 and reaffirmed unchanged in 1976, states: “… we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.” Under the circumstances, explains Ward, he had no other choice than to go along with the majority.
(The Texas-based United Methodist Reporter took a tougher stand than the Good News group. The newspaper criticized the reappointment and suggested that bringing Abels to trial is “the only responsible course of action left open to Bishop Ward and his cabinet if they are to uphold the church’s biblical, theological, and social principles.” Among the charges that might be brought, offered the newspaper in an editorial quoting Methodist law, are “immorality, crime, or other imprudent and un-Christian conduct,” “disobedience to the order and discipline” of the church, “disseminating doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrine of the church,” and “unministerial conduct or maladministration in office.”)
Ward has appointed a task force to study the issue of appointability and to report to the cabinet. He declined to comment on the possibility of lodging charges against Abels.
The New York case followed on the heels of a decision by the UMC’s Garrett-Evangelical Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, to dismiss two homosexual students. The decision generated widespread protest, both off and on campus, but a statement circulated among the alumni of the school defends the dismissal as being in accord with the school’s responsibility to prepare students for ordination.
On another stormy issue, General Secretary Tracey K. Jones, Jr., of the UMC Board of Global Ministries labeled the call by the Good News Evangelical Missions Council (EMC) for the resignation of the UMC Women’s Division staff “irresponsible, incomprehensible, and uninformed.” He affirmed that the staff’s “commitment to Christ … is beyond question.”
The EMC action is the first time in its twelve-year history that Good News has called for the resignation of UMC staff personnel, according to a Good News spokesman. The resolution noted that Bishop Muzorewa had “publicly stated the Marxist stance of at least one” staff person. “The Marxist views of staff persons in the Women’s division have long been a topic of conversation” in UMC circles, said the EMC.
The EMC also charged that “the official 1979 mission study materials on mainland China [published by the National Council of Churches] reveal a blatant bias, imbalance, and carefully slanted journalism that literally is spiritual treason because it calls 100 years of sacrificial missionary effort on the part of the church and missionaries a disastrous mistake that Maoism is correcting.” The group called for the creation of mission-study materials by a committee of evangelicals and for their availability throughout the ten-million-member denomination.
The eight-member EMC is chaired by Paul Morrell, pastor of the large Tyler Street Methodist Church in Dallas. “We are United Methodists, too,” he says. “Our concerns and perspectives are real and valid. Our willingness to be involved is certain … [UMC] boards and agencies must represent all of us and not the views of the select or the few.”
Voicing concern in still another area, the Good News board said an intensive eight-month study showed that UMC seminaries are casting evangelicals as “narrow, bigoted, fundamentalist, and unscholarly.” Evangelical students in the schools, the board alleged, often encounter “antagonism, hostility, and ridicule.” The seminaries are hostile to evangelical theology, the board said, and they don’t deal with it seriously. More faculty ought to be hired from the orthodox tradition, the board recommended.
The Good News group, based in Wilmore, Kentucky, has no formal membership, but its publication Good News has a circulation of 15,000, and there are 35,000 on the mailing list of the organization. Good News editor Charles Keysor serves as executive secretary of the group, and faculty member Paul A. Mickey of Duke University is chairman.
Record Offerings
Armored trucks may one day replace the traditional offering plate if the string of record Sunday offerings continues.
Television pastor Robert H. Schuller of the 9,000-member Garden Grove Community Church in Anaheim, California, reported a record single-Sunday collection of $1,251,356 to help build his church’s Crystal Cathedral (see July 21 issue, page 44). After checks in the next day’s mail from nonattenders were counted, the total reached $1,421,000.
One week later, on June 25, the 1,700-member independent Overlake Christian Church in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland received $1.65 million in cash and pledges toward a $1.8 million building project. The donations included seven diamond rings, several motor vehicles, and some newly borrowed money, according to pastor Bob Moore.
Religion writer John Dart of the Los Angeles Times discovered that the record for single Sunday offerings had been broken four times in the past fourteen months. The previous high-income marks were reported by three Church of Christ congregations in Texas: Broadway church in Lubbock ($886,900), Bammel Road church in Houston ($1.1 million), and Westbury church in Houston ($1.2 million).
“Remarkably,” noted Dart, “Garden Grove’s big-giving day did not lead to a drop in contributions on following Sundays.” A church spokesman told him that the average Sunday offering level of $60,000 was holding firm.
The Mennonites Come to Town
Mennonites and some of their ecclesiastical cousins from around the world come together every five years for fellowship and inspiration at the Mennonite World Conference (MWC). About 9,000 of them (1,000 or so from outside North America) came this year to Wichita, Kansas. It was the first such assembly in the United States in twenty years and the tenth in the WMC’s fifty-three-year history. (The Mennonite community, which includes Amish, Hutterites, and Brethren in Christ, as well as groups bearing the Mennonite name, has a membership of 613,000 baptized persons in forty nations, according to WMC sources.)
The delegated eighty-five-member General Council, which oversees the MWC and looks after Mennonite interests between assemblies, elected Charles Cristano of Indonesia as the new president. He succeeds Million Belete, an Ethiopian engaged in Bible society work in Nairobi, Kenya. Belete, who emphasized the familiar peace and anti-militarism themes of Mennonites in a talk, was the first African to hold the MWC presidency.
For the first time, a delegation attended from the Soviet Union, thanks partly to an invitation delivered personally by Belete. The six Mennonites and Baptists were led by Michael J. Zhidkov, pastor of the Moscow Baptist Church. Zhidkov also is vice-president of the All Union Council of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (AUCECB), the umbrella organization to which a number of the 55,000 Mennonites and their churches in the Soviet Union belong.
Zhidkov indicated that permission to make the visit was in line with a growing spirit of détente in recent years and with the Helsinki Treaty, which calls for “increased human contacts” between the East and West. He declined to comment on the recent sentencing of Soviet dissidents. The delegation had come to promote inter-church relations, it was explained. Zhidkov did insist that Christians as private citizens are free to criticize the government. However, he said, as ministers “we do not do so from the pulpit.” The church, he asserted, intercedes for the rights of its members, especially in the practice of their faith.
The visit of the Soviets attracted a demonstration outside the meeting by separatist preacher Carl McIntire and some of his followers; they charged that Zhidkov is an agent of the Soviet secret police.
In another demonstration, a group of Mennonites peeled off from the conference program and conducted a prayer vigil at the regional headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service to protest the collection of taxes for military spending.
The Mennonite community has its roots in the Anabaptist wing of the Reformation. Along with baptism of believers only, its distinctives include pacifism, an emphasis on separation from the world, and involvement in social services.
East Germany: Religious Détente?
Calm and storm, struggle and rapprochement, hope and despair—all have been counterthemes in church-and-state relations in the (East) German Democratic Republic during the past thirty years. Although a recent softening in attitude on the part of the political leadership of the GDR has fed hopes that a new era in church-and-state accord is just around the corner, the status of practicing Christians continues to be precarious and uncertain. That serious tensions still exist can be seen in such incidents as the self-immolation of Pastor Oskar Brüsewitz in Zeitz in protest against the oppression of Christian young people (see September 10, 1976, issue, page 81 and November 5, 1976, issue, page 80) and the exiling of controversial folk singer Wolf Biermann not long after he had held a concert in a Prenzlau church.
Government and church leaders met in 1969 to formalize the organizational division of East German Protestantism from its Western counterpart, but since then the only official contacts have taken place through the relatively low-level office of the State Secretary for Ecclesiastical Questions. This is headed by Hans Seigewasser, an old-time Communist who during the Nazi years had come to know and respect the pastors who were prisoners with him in the same concentration camp.
After repeated requests from the clerical side, party chief Erich Honecker agreed to meet last March with the five-member executive commmittee of the Evangelical Church Federation (led by the GDR’s senior Protestant bishop, Albrecht Schoenherr) and discuss future policies toward the church. Honecker’s motives were transparently political, some observers insist. For one thing, they say, he wanted to prevent the church from becoming a focal point for opponents to the new socialist order. Further, they add, he wanted to continue using the church as a device for upgrading the international reputation of the GDR. West German theologian Helmut Thielicke of Hamburg commented in a recent interview: ’‘The image of the regime in the area of human rights is tarnished, and this is an effort to put on a better face for world opinion.”
Although Honecker did not promise to alleviate restrictions on travel to the West or to curb discrimination against Christians in higher education and professional opportunities, he granted a bundle of concessions that took most observers by surprise. Both Protestant and Catholic churches would be granted radio and television time on special occasions, government assistance in funding clergy pensions, permission to carry out pastoral work and literature distribution in prison and to hold services in nursing and old people’s homes, financial help for the maintenance of church cemeteries, compensation for church-owned lands included in collective farms, and limited import of Western theological publications.
They also would be allowed to build church edifices in new communities like Eisenhüttenstadt where Protestant services are now being held in a house trailer, and public funds would be used to repair historic churches and buildings identified with the Reformation in preparation for the 1983 quincentennial of Martin Luther’s birth.
The immediate impact of the “thaw” was striking. Schoenherr’s Good Friday service in East Berlin and a Dresden service on Whitsunday were televised. For a change, the authorities did not try to hinder attendance at the Lutherans’ spring church assemblies in Leipzig, Erfurt, and Stralsund (the special trains and buses were mysteriously all on time), and in a sharp break with past practice some meetings were held outside the confines of churches. In Leipzig two halls of the fairgrounds were rented to help accommodate the 52,000 people who gathered there, and in Erfurt an open air rally in the cathedral square attracted 20,000. The Leipzig “Kirchentag” assembly was hailed by many leaders as the most important meeting organized by a church in the GDR for almost twenty-five years.
William Thomas, a black American evangelist, was allowed to conduct a week of services in a Baptist chapel in East Berlin. And reconstruction of the Berlin Protestant cathedral, a prominent downtown ruin in the GDR capital, has been proceeding with alacrity.
However, all is not so rosy as it appears. There has been no perceptible letup in unofficial discrimination against Christians. For example, a high school senior in a medium-sized industrial town was denied admittance to university studies, according to his parents. In an interview, they said that he had straight A grades but had refused to state categorically to the school authorities that he was “a convinced Marxist-Leninist.”
A graduating university student who specializes in Western languages confided in another interview that he had been denied employment as a translator, the profession for which he had trained, because his dossier revealed that he was a believer. Instead, he was assigned to the lesser post of teacher in a trade school.
Even more serious is the determination of the state to implement a program of military instruction (including the use of weapons) in the high school curriculum for all children and both sexes. Church spokesmen protested vigorously that this legislation would lead to the militarization of the state. Their arguments were brushed aside, though, and the new courses are to be introduced this fall.
As a result, the future for East German believers is uncertain. Privately, most churchmen seem skeptical about the Honecker detente. “We are doubtful; we want to know what is behind it,” said a theology professor. They want to see whether it is a temporary ploy to neutralize potential opposition within the ecclesiastical ranks or a genuine effort to have the church occupy its legitimate place in GDR society.
The possibility of an ugly confrontation looms over the military instruction question. Church leaders face a perplexing dilemma. If they continue to oppose it, the church will be portrayed as a “class enemy,” the implacable foe of the worker’s state and the socialist order. If they give in, their children will be exposed to militaristic indoctrination, while at the same time it will be plain to all that the church can be bullied. Thus the basic theme of church-state tension in the GDR remains unchanged and the prospects of the church clouded.
RICHARD V. PIERARD and ROBERT D. LINDER
Evangelicals Can Wait
Evangelicals may be keenly interested in heaven, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will flock to a movie with a heavenly title and an after-life theme.
That’s what executives of Paramount Pictures found out last month when a special promotion of the popular motion picture Heaven Can Wait fizzled in Wheaton, Illinois. The Chicago suburb of 40,000 is often billed as the “Evangelical Vatican,” because of the large number of conservative Protestant organizations headquartered there. (A researcher claims he has identified more than 350 in the Wheaton vicinity.)
Paramount mailed 100 free movie tickets to clergymen in town and to leaders of thirty-two Wheaton-based organizations, including religious publishing houses, mission agencies, and national church groups. Only 30 of the select 100, however, showed up at the special showing in a Wheaton movie house, and many of them had seen the film before, according to a Chicago Tribune report.
Accompanying each free ticket was a letter of invitation that included a reprint of a glowing review of the film from a National Council of Churches publication. (The movie is about a professional football player who is snatched too soon into the hereafter by an inept guardian angel during a highway accident, only to find that he is not due to arrive in heaven until fifty years later.)
It all began when a Paramount marketing executive read a newspaper article about the concentration of evangelicals in Wheaton, explained publicity man Sherman Wolf. The executive, said Wolf, reasoned that “if we could get these people to see the film, they would realize that all movies aren’t bad. And they’d tell their friends about it.” If Paramount is to get a share of the evangelical audience, he concluded, Wheaton would be a good place to start.
Seemingly undeterred by the poor turnout, Wolf said he planned to phone all the no shows and perhaps schedule another screening later on. Paramount is trying to tap the nonmoviegoer market, he commented, something that “may take time.”
No Secret
It is no secret that unchurched young adults are much more likely than older churchgoers to have permissive attitudes toward extramarital sex. Gallup Poll findings released last month suggest that age and faith are indeed important factors in how people feel about the topic. Only 52 per cent of persons between 18 and 29, for example, said that extramarital sex is “always wrong,” while 61 per cent of adults between 34 and 49 and 77 per cent of those over 50 registered a similar belief, according to the survey. Among the unchurched, 53 per cent said they feel that way, but 74 per cent of the churched went on record as being always opposed to extramarital sex. Protestants (71 per cent) were somewhat more likely to hold such a view than Catholics (64 per cent).
Scientology in Court
Eleven high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology, including the wife of founder L. Ron Hubbard, were charged with a number of serious crimes in a forty-two-page indictment handed up by a federal grand jury last month. The indictments were expected ever since FBI agents, acting on information obtained from a former Scientology official, raided Scientology offices in Los Angeles and Washington last year and seized thousands of allegedly incriminating documents (see August 12, 1977, issue, page 32, and May 19, 1978, issue, page 60).
The indictment charges that the Scientologists conspired to plant spies in government agencies, break into government offices, steal official documents, and bug government meetings. A number of theft and burglary counts are included in the indictment. (Several members of the church were caught removing documents from government offices.)
Much of the evidence outlined in the indictment seems to be based on the church’s own internal memos and other documents. The conspiracy against the government began in 1973, according to the indictment.
Scientology spokesmen implied that whatever the church did to obtain information about itself in government files was done in self-defense. The indictment, said a church news release, “places the Justice Department in a vulnerable position, for the very documents in question will support the church’s disclosure of a twenty-eight-year campaign by intelligence agency operatives working throughout the world to create an international suppression of the religion of Scientology.”
“This indictment represents grand jury findings of criminal conduct; nowhere does it mention religion,” commented prosecutor Raymond Banoun.
In a rare public appearance, Mary Sue Hubbard surrendered in court in Washington with eight other Scientologists. They were released on their own recognizance. Two persons based in England—where the Hubbards live—were expected to surrender later. Those indicted either directed or worked for the church’s Guardian offices. These offices apparently were responsible for defending the church and for attacking its real and potential enemies.
Those arrested include the church’s highest U.S. official, Henning Heldt (listed as Deputy U.S. Guardian), and his chief deputy, Duke Snider.
Religion in Transit
The strike that halted publication of three New York City daily newspapers was a boon for evangelist Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. News-hungry New Yorkers snatched up 300,000 copies a day of Moon’s News World, according to a Moon spokesman. Usual daily circulation: 50,000.
Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, the school that was decimated by the large-scale faculty and student walkout in 1974 during the doctrinal conflict in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, is well on the road to full recovery. The student population has been replenished, and the school has full accreditation from both the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) and the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. The ATS in 1976 lifted its second of two probations that had been imposed because of the controversy. A joint team from the two accrediting associations last month gave the school a clean bill of health.
The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union has added a priest, a nun, and a Disciples of Christ minister to its staff. The union wants to attract more support from church groups in its long boycott of J.P. Stevens Company products. Its aim is to unionize the company’s workers, something it has failed to do for fifteen years. Most of the firm’s eighty-five plants are in the South.
Corbin L. Cherry, a United Methodist, has been appointed director of the Chaplain Service for the U.S. Veterans Administration. He will oversee the work of 984 chaplains in 172 VA hospitals. He lost a foot in the Viet Nam conflict when he stepped on a mine.
Correction
A “Southern Baptist” gift of $5,000 to support the Church World Service wheat shipment to Viet Nam (as reported in the March 24 issue, page 53) was never received, according to CWS executive director Paul F. McCleary. A spokesman for the National Council of Churches, of which CWS is an agency, had furnished the list of donors originally. However, when Southern Baptist readers questioned the report, McCleary said there had been a “tentative pledge” but that it had been withdrawn. He neither identified the person responsible for the pledge nor said why it was withdrawn.
More than 16,000 soldiers of South Korea’s elite Sixth Corps listened to gospel preaching in an evangelistic program planned by the army’s chaplain corps and Baptist agencies. As a result, say missionaries, more than 2,200 men signed decision cards, and another 570 soldiers—including two battalion commanders—were baptized. There have been mass baptisms of Korean troops before, but under Presbyterian auspices. (The majority of the country’s Protestants are Presbyterians.)
Miss Dr. R. Etchells was appointed to head St. John’s College in Durham, a school where Anglican men are prepared for ordination. She is the first woman to hold such a position.
Certain groups that have split from the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland reject any kind of medical vaccination, and about 100 adherents—most of them children—were stricken by polio this past summer. Members regard disease as a display of God’s wrath. They cite a passage from the fifth chapter of Luke: “Those who are well need no physician.” Happily, the polio virus afflicting them is apparently mild and not a killer.
About 1,000 men, women, and children marched twenty miles to Guatemala City to demand a government investigation into the murder of their parish pastor. Hermogenes Lopez. The priest was known as a campaigner in behalf of peasants’ rights. Most recently he fought an industry’s water plan that would have hurt irrigation of peasants’ farms.
James I. Packer, associate principal of Trinity Collge in Bristol, England, and one of the Church of England’s leading evangelical theologians, will move to Vancouver, British Columbia, next year to teach at Regent College.
Richard Anderson, a medical missionary from Britain, was appointed international general secretary of the Africa Inland Mission. He succeeds Australian Norman Thomas.
Deaths
MYRON F. BOYD, 69, Bishop-emeritus of the Free Methodist Church of North America, who for twenty years was radio pastor of the denomination’s international radio program, “Light and Life Hour”; in St. Louis, of a heart attack following surgery.
GLENN “TEX” EVANS, 67, retired United Methodist evangelist, popular humorist, and founder of the Appalachia Service Project, the volunteer organization that refurbishes homes in Kentucky and Tennessee; in Nashville, of cancer.
FRANCIS PICKENS MILLER, 83, prominent Southern Presbyterian layman, author, and former chairman of the Geneva-based World Student Christian Movement; in Norfolk, Virginia, after a brief illness.
