United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. General Assembly
The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (UPCUSA) chose peacemaking as its mission priority for the next four years. Earlier this month its policy-making General Assembly voted to encourage members’ study and action on such peace issues as disarmament and international economics. The 625 commissioners (delegates) also voted against U.S. military budget increases, development of the MX missile system, and the use of military force in resolving the Iranian hostage crisis.
Against this backdrop, many Presbyterian watchers couldn’t help wondering if the Detroit assembly had done enough—if, in fact, anything substantial—to make peace among the United Presbyterians themselves.
The primary case in point involved the relatively small, but influential, group of churches and pastors that on biblical grounds oppose women officers in the church. These left Detroit dissatisfied—and some leaned toward joining the 28 churches that already have withdrawn from the UPCUSA over the women’s issue—after the assembly overwhelmingly reaffirmed its year-old constitutional amendment (the so-called Overture L) requiring election of both men and women elders and deacons to local church boards. In addition, the assembly proposed added provisions by which the presbyteries can monitor compliance with Overture L. The latter provisions were seen by some as erasing the defense that Overture L was unenforceable and, as such, not binding on local churches.
(Moments before its nearly 10-to-1 vote affirming required election of women officers, the assembly defeated a bills and overtures committee minority report that called for “giving fair representation of men and women” instead of their mandatory election. At least 11 overtures sent to the assembly had advocated similar changes.)
The commissioners did approve an exemption clause, of sorts, for those churches not electing women officers. They voted to send presbyteries a proposed addition to the constitution, saying that churches not electing women officers must apply to their presbytery for a waiver of the requirements. A three-year exemption, subject to renewal, would be granted if, by a three-fourths vote of the presbytery, it is determined the church is making an effort to move toward compliance. The constitutional change requires a majority vote of the presbyteries.
Depending upon who is doing the analyzing, the provisions were either hard line or conciliatory. Newly elected moderator Charles A. Hammond, a presbytery executive from Indiana and a champion of the church’s women’s rights legislation, called it a “reconciling” action. Pastor Gerhard Grau of Chester, Pennsylvania, a member of the powerful bills and overtures committee that proposed the legislation, said it would be “the devil’s work” for anyone to interpret the assembly’s action as an attempt to oust from the denomination opponents of women officers. In his view, moving toward compliance with Overture L means “staying in dialogue” on the issue. If the committee hadn’t wanted to conciliate conservatives, it “wouldn’t have put the exemption clause in,” he said.
Susan Thornton of the church’s Council on Women and the Church (COWAC), which voted last March to resist any changes in Overture L, generally agreed with Grau. However, she said, those who have “already made up their minds” against women officers, in effect “have chosen to leave the church” and would be in violation.
At a formative meeting last fall of the Concerned United Presbyterians, more than 100 pastors agreed to remain in the denomination at least until the General Assembly. If the assembly offered them no relief from Overture L, they indicated they would be forced to withdraw. The assembly’s action this month certainly did not spell relief for CUP leaders, according to secretary David Coffin, a Ligonier, Pennsylvania, elder.
The CUP steering committee would meet this month to determine the next course of action. An estimated 200 UPCUSA congregations (1,300 of 8,700 congregations do not have women officers) identify with CUP, said Coffin.
Pastors of two congregations that already have left were CUP steering committee members: pastor James Boice’s Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia seceded several months earlier, and CUP leaders still were stunned that popular radio pastor Bruce W. Dunn’s 2,000-member Grace Presbyterian Church in Peoria, Illinois, had seceded just prior to the General Assembly.
“What this has turned out to be is a process for enforcement, while making it look like an allowance,” said Coffin. He lamented the absence of language allowing “conscientious objector” status for those unable to ordain women officers. Coffin said he opposes those who discriminate against women officers on sexist grounds. In three meetings with representatives of the United Presbyterian Women and COWAC prior to the assembly, CUP board members tried to come to an understanding.
Coffin acknowledges that a number of churches, including his own, now may have to leave the denomination on moral grounds. They can’t move to comply on something they don’t believe in. he said. But out of respect for evangelicals who are committed to bringing renewal while staying within the denomination, he opposed an exodus of sympathetic churches.
Outgoing moderator Howard Rice, the popular San Francisco seminary professor who had sought to build bridges between opposing UPCUSA factions, believed the assembly had intended to make room in the church for those conscientiously opposed to women officers. However, he believed it might be necessary for the stated clerk, William Thompson, to give an interpretation of what it means to “move toward compliance” with Overture L.
Most observers agree the exemption provisions would help those in sympathetic presbyteries, while those in hard-line women’s rights presbyteries would be hurt. The presbyteries face some sticky questions. For instance, who can say whether a church has no women officers because of biblical conscience, or because of sexism?
Matthew Welde, head of an evangelical presbyterian group, Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns, has worked to keep congregations from leaving the UPCUSA He indicated that possibly “scores could leave.” Even if those churches don’t secede now, he told a reporter, the assembly had made clear that local churches eventually will have to elect women officers if they are to stay within the denomination.
As expected, the assembly approved a constitutional amendment making specific the concept that all church property is held in trust for the denomination as a whole. Church officials believed the amendment necessary, since recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on church property have sided with congregations in these denominations that do not have specific constitutional claims to the property. They hoped for a speedy ratification of the amendment in order to “close the barn door” sooner. The UPCUSA missions council had recommended appointment of a special commission, which would canvass the presbyteries and fix the date of the changes if the majority approved them.
However, the committee on bills and overtures, which handled the property matter, suggested that “the established procedure” for ratification be followed, and the assembly approved with little discussion.
Unhappy UPCUSA congregations have perhaps another 12 months to withdraw with legal support for their claim to property; the presbyteries’ votes on the amendment won’t be formally received until next year’s General Assembly. Majority approval (at least 77 of the 152 presbyteries) is required. (The assembly rejected a minority report that would have allowed alienated congregations to leave with their buildings if certain lengthy, prescribed conciliation efforts failed.)
The assembly intentionally ignored speaking to the ongoing controversy regarding the deity of Christ. Several overtures (petitions for action) had asked for the assembly’s positive affirmation of Christ’s full humanity and deity—this, in light of the National Capital Union Presbytery’s appointment of Mansfield Kaseman to a Rockville, Maryland, pastorate, even though he rejected this belief during his examination by the presbytery.
An assembly subcommittee reportedly had been prepared to issue a prodeity statement for the approval of the assembly. However, it withdrew that statement after stated clerk Thompson said he would declare it out of order if it reached the assembly floor. Kaseman’s appointment was still on appeal at the synod level, and such a statement might prejudice the case, and thus, he said, would be in violation of the church’s Book of Order.
There was little assembly debate or challenge of Thompson’s interpretation, although one Kansas pastor privately called it a “gag rule” designed to prevent divisive debate. Others saw Thompson’s ruling as consistent with his duties as parliamentarian, and said no such prodeity statement was necessary since Presbyterian confessions already say as much.
In any event, conservatives indicated they would delay a fight, pending final judgment on Kaseman’s status by the church’s highest court. (Liberal and conservative UPCUSA groups lobbied extensively during the convention. The PUBC, for instance, held morning briefing and prayer sessions. Pastor Chuck Wiggins of Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, said that 10 percent of the delegates are liberal and 10 percent are conservative: “It’s essentially a game of who can best interpret the mission of the church to the 80 percent in between.”)
Other actions of the assembly:
• Reaffirmed the church’s position favoring a woman’s right to personal choice in regard to abortion—in the process, rejecting an explicit, prolife resolution outlining biblical principles against abortion and ways the local church can discourage abortion.
• Joined the electronic church by approving a $2.25 million, five-year project, with the ultimate goal of producing prime-time television documentary specials.
• Recommended that meetings of local church boards be open, not closed, to members.
• Affirmed that baptism be administered only once to an individual, while voting down proposals suggesting a second baptism to “celebrate significant religious awakenings occurring later in life.”
• Narrowly rejected a committee’s recommendation that general assemblies meet biennially, rather than annually, as a way to conserve funds and resources.
Even the most controversial issues, such as the abortion and women’s issues, received little extended debate on the floor of the assembly. Long-time assembly attenders were surprised by the apparent apathy, considering the many controversial issues before the 2.4-million-member denomination. They conceded, however, that the real news will be what happens afterward as the various presbyteries react to the assembly’s actions in Detroit.
The California Primary
San Jose Voters Rally to Defeat Gay Rights Measure
A tangible “moral majority” in this country can be powerfully influential at the polls, evangelical church leaders in San Jose, California, believe, following the defeat of an anti-discriminatory gay measure there in the California primary election June 3.
By nearly a three-to-one margin, voters in Santa Clara County (which includes San Jose) defeated measures A and B, which sought to give homosexuals the right to sue if denied housing, employment, or governmental services solely because of sexual preference.
“This election revealed what we have been saying—namely, Christians and others of like mind constitute a moral majority and in this election they stood up and were counted.” So stated Marvin Rickard, pastor of the 5,000-member Los Gatos Christian Church and executive committee member of Californians for Biblical Morality, a group that worked hard to defeat the measure.
“This is only the beginning,” indicated Dean Wycoff, director of Moral Majority of Santa Clara County, an organization orginated by TV evangelist Jerry Falwell of Lynchburg, Virginia. “The sleeping giant has been awakened.”
The election culminated a series of accusations, innuendos, and open debate between proponents and opponents of the measures, all of which came to a head on the Friday before the primary. In a hastily called press conference at the 130-year-old First Baptist Church of San Jose, evangelical church leaders said they represented 600 county churches. Their announcement was intended to offset news coverage given to a Santa Clara County Council of Churches statement asserting that over 80 of its churches favored the measures on the basis of “civil rights” for all segments of society.
First Baptist pastor Kenneth E. Moon said at the press conference, “We resent the council of churches allowing itself to be used to give the impression that a majority of churches and clergy support measures A and B.”
The council of churches position was unfairly criticized, said Dwight Kintner, executive minister. The recommendation actually was made by the council’s executive board for its own constituent churches and inadvertently was made public by the news media, he said. Kintner emphasized that the council did not endorse homosexuality but had recommended an affirmative vote on the propositions “to insure civil rights for all.”
Evangelical ministers felt otherwise. Typical was a full-page ad in both the San Jose Mercury and News, which appeared the day of the press conference. Supportive members of Bethel Church of San Jose paid for the ad, in which their pastor, Charles T. Crabtree, outlined his position on the measures. The issue, he said in the ad, is indeed a civil rights issue; but he maintained that an employer should have the civil right not to hire a practicing homosexual if he felt it would threaten morality standards in his company.
After the election Crabtree stated that “the electorate was made to face the rightness and wrongness of homosexuality.” Homosexuality (and its related problems), he said, was made the focus of the issue and not civil rights.
Not all evangelical ministers went along totally with the “Christian voting block” concept, though they were strong in their condemnation of the gay rights measures. Vern Heidebrecht, pastor of San Jose’s Lincoln Glen Church (Mennonite Brethren) and a former six-year president of the local National Association of Evangelicals chapter, said he personally was not a “political activist” or a believer in a Christian “mass voting force” concept.
Heidebrecht said that proper biblical teaching within the church is the key to an en lightened Christian electorate. “When the church does its job and the teaching of the Scripture is clear, then there will be a moral tide in the community.” he declared. He pointed out that proponents of these measures tried to depict evangelicals as a “vocal radical minority and as eccentric religious bigots.” but the strength of proper teaching in the church won out.
In the combined Mercury-News Saturday church page preceding the election, a one-half page ad supporting the measures was taken and paid for by the “Live and Let Live” committee, a group related to the Santa Clara Valley Coalition for Human Rights, one of the main proponents of the measures. Their ad, used without the permission of the council of churches, advocated passage of the measures based on a council of churches statement that “to do otherwise is to persecute a segment of society in the name of Christianity.”
Jane Taylor, assistant pastor of San Jose’s gay Metropolitan Community Church, claimed that opponents used “scare techniques” and portrayed gays as “evil, sinful people who wanted to disturb society.” These people are “latent bigots,” she said.
When asked if there were other gay rights measures on the horizon, Taylor said, “We’ll be back again—but not right away. Straight society has said they don’t want us.”
ROGER KOSKELA
Patching the Umbrella
The NBEA: Striving to Be Both Black and Biblical
Leaders of the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA) still hope to reach an agreement that will mend divisions within the 17-year-old group. Specifically, talks and studies have begun with the goal of reconsideration by three prominent NBEA leaders of their earlier decisions to resign from the 30-member board of directors (May 23. p. 44). Following a specially called NBEA board meeting last month in Dallas. Texas—designed to air and reconcile differences—board chairman William H. Bentley acknowledged that “some problems still exist,” but said the entire group agreed “there are more things, of major importance, which unite us as a body, than things which divide us.”
Outgoing NBEA president Ruben S. Conner had cited “serious theological problems” at the NBEA annual convention in April, when he publicly submitted his letter of resignation and those of outgoing first vice-president Anthony Evans and Dallas chapter chairperson Eddie B. Lane. They explained their reasons in a three-page document, which was the basis for discussions at the board meeting last month.
They listed theological, philosophical, and organizational differences with the NBEA—a major concern being that at present within the group “the Bible is not the final basis of appeal.” Too often, they said, history, culture, experience, and sociology, are placed on the same authoritative scale as Scripture.
Conner, who is president of the Dallas-based inner-city ministry. Black Evangelistic Enterprise, indicated that NBEA members themselves are not necessarily to blame, but that a weak view of Scripture often has come from outside speakers and workshop leaders. In their position paper, the three men requested that a definitive NBEA doctrinal statement be drafted, which would have the effect of screening out NBEA member groups and speakers that reject full scriptural authority.
Particularly, they are concerned about so-called Black Christian nationalism, a view articulated by board chairman William Bentley—but from what he calls “an evangelical perspective.” It asserts there is a black theology that can be taught only by black theologians. In an interview, Bentley explained that traditional Western theology has been unable and unwilling to speak to the black situation: “There has been little in a redemptive way to say to the oppressed.”
Evans would agree with Bentley that white theology in the past has ignored the plight of blacks. But he, Conner, and Lane believe only that a biblical, not a black theology, is valid in speaking to the black situation.
Bentley, on the other hand, doesn’t separate the black, from a biblical, theology. While he asserts his position is as biblically sound as Evans’s, Bentley indicates “the cultural would play a much larger part in my theology than theirs.” A key disagreement has been whether the NBEA umbrella should be wide enough to include the black nationalistic theology.
As cochairmen of the Black Theology Commission, which since 1976 has held theology workshops at annual NBEA conventions. Bentley and Anthony Evans have presided over sometimes heated debates on the subject. During a particularly lively workshop several years ago, Evans had argued, “If the Bible message and blackness bump heads, blackness must go.”
Bentley supports what he calls “Black Evangelical Christian Nationalism.” which, he says, “puts an equal emphasis on both blackness and Christianity.” In a telephone interview, Bentley explained. “We [blacks] identify ourselves as being black before we become Christians. By becoming Christians, we don’t negate our blackness. Christ transcends culture; he does not negate it.”
This position differs from the black Christian nationalism espoused by pastor Albert Cleage of Detroit’s Church of the Black Madonna, said Bentley. He disagrees with Cleage’s “erroneous, non-Christian” position that blacks, not the Jews, are God’s chosen people, and that Christ was black.
In Evans’s view, the NBEA devotes too much time to dialogue, when it should be speaking to issues and taking action to help the “common, black man on the street.” The nation’s 30 million blacks face unemployment and economic problems, and because of widespread theological liberalism in the black community, there’s “a greater opportunity for confusion than there’s ever been,” Evans said in a telephone interview.
Adoption of a strong doctrinal statement, which affirms inerrancy and the Bible as the “foundation and authoritative bottom line” in NBEA discussion, would give members a common ground from which to work, said Evans, a local church pastor and Dallas Seminary homiletics professor. “If everyone was agreed on what we believed, we wouldn’t have to dialogue so much … I’m crying for action that rests on the proper theological basis.”
During the special meeting the entire board unanimously reaffirmed the doctrinal stance of the NBEA as expressed in its official brochure and bylaws. However, the three men’s recommendations for strengthening certain points were referred to a committee, which will report back at the board’s biannual meeting in October. (Conner’s group, for instance, asked for an explicit statement confirming inerrancy: the present NBEA faith statement affirms the Bible as the “inspired, only infallible authoritative Word of God.”)
The three also criticized the NBEA for not centering its ministry on the local church. They believed the group should avoid becoming a “primarily answer-oriented organization,” saying it cannot practically speak as one voice for the many different groups under the NBEA umbrella.
In a recent meeting at CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Bentley, Conner, newly elected NBEA president Ben Johnson, and Youth for Christ official Glandion Carney (who had chaired the special board meeting), agreed that conciliatory measures are being sought on all sides. They indicated a mutual desire to bring unity to the NBEA and opposition to membership splits. With conciliation in mind, Bentley said, Conner was added to the NBEA’s executive committee; Lane and Evans will be taking part in studies, prior to the October board meeting, designed to examine and correct the alleged shortcomings of the organization. As a result, the three asked that their resignations be tabled pending the results of committee recommendations and board action in October.
Bentley and Conner agreed that a united NBEA can make a special contribution to black churchmen, who now are facing a number of crucial sociological, economic, and theological ills. They believe the NBEA—with a mailing list of 5,000 and a constitutency of between 30,000 and 40,000—can bring liberal blacks to a more evangelical position, as well as attune the white community to black needs: about one-third of those attending the seventeenth annual convention in April were white, said Bentley.
Some conservative blacks have reservations about the NBEA and are watching developments closely, said Conner. (Many of these are in Conner’s Dallas chapter, one of the NBEA’s strongest.)
“A lot of older evangelicals who have left the organization are looking again,” he said. “Some of them are seriously watching. I think people want an organization that speaks to issues in a holistic and, especially, a biblical perspective. Then, I think people are going to come.”
JOHN MAUST
The Religious Communications Congress
Talking to Themselves about Themselves
Asked to summarize in a concluding banquet address the proceedings of Religious Communications Congress/1980, church historian Martin Marty began by noting his “relief” at coming to a convention that did not pass resolutions. In fact, a consensus would have been difficult: more than 1,300 Protestant, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish communicators from 18 countries and 49 participating organizations attended the once-every-ten-years congress last month in Nashville.
Congress chairman Curtis Chambers, head of United Methodist Communications, said RCC objectives included study of new technologies and the role of religious communications in the 1980s.
Speakers differed in their observations regarding strengths and weaknesses in religion news coverage. Speaking to Associated Church Press members, Nashville Tennessean publisher John Siegenthaler criticized a lack of initiative by the religious media: “The secular media [are] winning awards for stories that should have been yours.” In contrast. Wesley Pippert, an evangelical who covers the White House for United Press International, told his RCC audience that the secular media ignore important ethical and moral issues; for instance, they have neglected probing how Jimmy Carter’s deep religious beliefs affect his presidential actions, he said.
In a seminar on the public’s attitude toward religion, Cincinnati Enquirer religion editor Ben Kaufman disputed pollster George Gallup’s remarks that conservative, evangelical forces show new strength. In another seminar, executive director Ben Armstrong of the National Religious Broadcasters disagreed when communications official William Fore of the National Council of Churches cited “sugar coating” of religion by some TV preachers. They did agree on the need for further study of the impact of the electronic church, and Fore said that he, Armstrong, and Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network would seek funds for such a study. (Planners had selected two speakers for each seminar to approach the same subject from different perspectives, with the opportunity to rebut one another.)
Several international participants emphasized the future importance in the Third World of the more personalized “group media”—media that allow for audience response and involvement. Speakers and exhibitors attested to the growth of computer, cable television, videocassette, and satellite communications. (The entire Bible can be transmitted in half a second over one satellite channel, a speaker said.)
While religious communicators use the tools of mass media, said Marty, most do not speak to a mass audience. RCC participants should realize they speak mostly to subcommunities or their own constituencies: “Accept who you are, and where you are. Otherwise, you won’t do any good.”
The Cults
Are Moonies in New Phase? Raiders and Koreanization
Sun Myung Moon announced in April the successful completion of his 21-year campaign to establish his Unification Church in the United States. Recent developments, however, indicate things are far from settled.
Moon last month named as new U.S. president Mose Durst, 40, a reputed hard-liner who was director of the cult’s aggressive California branch. In recent months, Unificationists have engaged in numerous dialogues with evangelicals and other religious leaders, and increasingly the group has sought acceptance in the Christian mainstream—referring to themselves as Christians. Whether Durst’s appointment indicates a separationist return to the aggressive tactics, which in the past have angered Unification opponents, remains open to question.
A Brooklyn-born Orthodox Jew with a Ph D. in English from the University of Oregon, Durst taught at Oregon and at Queens (New York) and Lycoming (Pennsylvania) colleges before moving to the San Francisco Bay area in the late sixties. He joined the Unification Church in 1972. In 1974 he married his second wife, Yeon Soo Lin, who prefers to be called Onni, a Korean word meaning “respected sister” Active in the San Francisco center (founded in 1965 by Sang Ik Choi), Onni crossed the Bay to establish the Unification Church center in Oakland in 1970.
Nadine Hack, assistant director for Northern California under Durst, says the presidency will assume greater significance as a consequence of Moon’s announced completion of his U.S. mission.
(Moon says he will continue as the movement’s spiritual leader, while Durst will shoulder most of the administrative responsibility as the church advances into the 1980s. Unification sources hint that Moon may devote his time to rewriting The Divine Principle.)
Highly qualified observers call Hack’s assessment of the new president’s importance exaggerated. One sees him as “essentially a PR man”; another said there are perhaps 10 individuals with more power than Durst in the organization, most of them Korean, and described him as a “front man.”
Durst replaces Neil A. Salonen, 35, a former Lutheran, who stepped down after eight years at the helm of Moon’s U.S. organization. Salonen will continue to serve on the church’s seven-man board of directors and as “secretary-general” of the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (ICUS).
Significantly, Michael Young Warder, 33, resigned from the latter post—and from the church—immediately following the eighth annual ICUS last November. The Stanford graduate had engineered the past five science conferences in addition to serving as president and publisher of Moon’s New York metropolitan daily. The News World.
Contacted by telephone, Warder gave three reasons for leaving: (1) the increased power over the past two years of Koreans, resulting in “Koreanization” of the American church; (2) more authoritarian control resulting from “increasing personalization of Moon’s authority”; and (3) “lack of institutional support for the nuclear family within the church”—frequent separation of mates and of children from their parents.
Kathie Lowrey, Unification Church public affairs director, denies rumors that Durst’s appointment shows a shift in policy or strategy. Six months ago Salonen estimated that the American church had 50,000 adherents (commonly called “Moonies”), 7,700 of them fulltime disciples. Durst’s figures are more modest: 30,000 and 7,500. But informed sources consider the core membership to be much lower: “3,000 to 4,000 maximum” is the opinion of one; “4,500 would be a high estimate,” according to a Moonie graduate student; a third source doubts that American-born members in the church number more than 2,000.
As for Unification Church claims to 3 million followers in 127 countries worldwide, the third observer argues that this figure is highly inflated on the basis that Moon has married scarcely more than 3,000 couples in several mass ceremonies. Northern California Moonies have been highly successful in the critical areas of recruitment and fund raising, and one theory has it that the Dursts have been elevated for the purpose of bolstering sagging membership and income.
After the Durst appointment, Lowell D. Streiker, executive director of the Freedom Counseling Center in Burlingame, California, told reporters. “The ascendency of Dr. Durst represents a major shift in the leadership of the Moon empire. In sum, the most radical elements are now in control; the moderates have been shunted aside.” He accused the Creative Community Project (best known of several Moon-related social service agencies in the Bay Area) of “misrepresentation, seclusion, psychological manipulation, and group pressure to win and keep converts,” which average 50 to 70 weekly “at just its Camp K recruitment center in Sonoma County.”
In a telephone interview, Durst declined comment on specific charges while deploring the “anti-Moon mentality” behind them. He also denied allegations of contention between the group’s Oakland and New York leadership. A highly placed Unification source sees the Durst appointment as a “brilliant move” to unite East and West and to silence criticism of Northern California’s aggressive fund-raising teams, known elsewhere in the Unification Church as “the Oak land Raiders.”
Are 200 of the Oakland family’s 300 members being trained “for nationwide recruitment activities,” as reported by Streiker? “All of our members are so trained,” replied Durst. “It is our goal to reach not only the nation but the entire world with the love of Jesus Christ.” To that end he hopes to nationalize the social welfare programs that have met with success in California and to advance the “home church” strategy adopted by the church last fall.
The plan calls for transition from live-in centers to one-family residential units. Moonie couples or singles move into a neighborhood, establish themselves in a house or apartment, then evangelize the surrounding area. Each district of 360 dwelling units becomes a microcosm of the world, the number 360 representing the degrees of a circle. The Unification Church goal of global penetration—per Moon’s oft-quoted dictum “I will conquer and subjugate the world!”—is thus constantly kept in view.
JOSEPH M. HOPKINS
North American Scene
Singer Anita Bryant’s petition for divorce has sent shock waves through the Christian community. A leader in various profamily and morality causes, and author of three Christian inspiration books, Bryant, 40, secluded herself after she filed divorce papers May 22 in Dade County (Florida) Circuit Court, against her husband of 20 years. Bob Green, and declined all requests for interviews. She resigned from her Miami-based Anita Bryant Ministries, which she founded to work with homosexuals whose lifestyles she opposes. Bryant, whose parents divorced when she was three, charged in her divorce petition that Green had “conspired to control me” and “violated my most precious asset: my very conscience.” She asked for custody of the couple’s four children, and for half the couple’s property.
More than 4,000 women studied ways to strengthen the family and replace humanistic values with biblical ones last month at a “Mid-Continent Christian Women’s Concerns Conference.” Held in the Memphis, Tennessee, church of outgoing Southern Baptist president Adrian Rogers, the interdenominational meeting attracted 1,000 more women than expected—so that both auditoriums were opened and all general sessions were held twice. Rogers’s wife, Joyce, coordinated the three-day meeting, which featured 35 workshops on topics ranging from biblical submission to raising teen-agers. Speakers included author Elisabeth Elliot, Christian Women’s Clubs leader Millie Dienert, and Rogers himself. Some, such as family life author Beverly LaHaye, took aim and fired at both the feminist movement and the Equal Rights Amendment.
“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t give concerts,” judged Los Angeles Times critic Martin Bernheimer, following what he called an acoustically poor fund-raising concert last month in pastor Robert Schuller’s nearly completed Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. The audience filled 3,000 seats and paid $1,500 apiece for tickets—scaled to defray final construction costs of the $16.8 million structure—to hear operatic soprano Beverly Sills in her farewell recital.
The ambitious goal of the Christian and Missionary Alliance to double its adult constituency by 1987 is ahead of schedule, announced CMA president Louis L. King at the denomination’s annual meetings last month. The CMA’s inclusive membership (both members and those who attend regularly and support the church financially) in North America jumped a record 7.9 percent last year to a 216,000 total. The church logged a 13.7 percent membership jump—to 1.4 million—in its overseas churches during 1978, the latest year of reporting.
Advocates of voluntary public school prayer intensified their efforts last month. They sought the needed signatures of 218 congressmen on a petition that would discharge Senate Bill 450 from the House Judiciary Committee, where it has been bottled up. Senator Jesse Helms’s (R.-N.C.) bill would bar federal courts from ruling on school prayer disputes. Organizations supporting the effort were religious lobbies Moral Majority, Religious Roundtable, and Christian Voice, as well as Campus Crusade and the National Association of Evangelicals. A new supporter of the prayer effort has been William Murray, who only recently repudiated the atheist stance of his mother, Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
Thousands of Christians have protested a “Jesus sex film” that doesn’t exist. Undetermined parties are circulating throughout the nation a petition asking that people write to Modern People News (the actual name is Modern People Productions) in Franklin Park. Illinois, to protest a sex film depicting Jesus as a homosexual. Frustrated spokesmen say the magazine has nothing to do with such a movie; they do acknowledge publishing an article more than two years ago that reported that such a film was being contemplated by European producers; they also published the results of a readership poll showing that 99 percent are opposed to the film. However, they say no such film has been or is being made. The firm has received an estimated 100,000 protest letters to date.
Personalia
Canadian theologian Bernard MacDonald stood fast last month in his refusal to pay income taxes that finance abortions. MacDonald, a professor at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, wrote Canada’s receiver general, telling of his intentions and asking for a cost breakdown, per $1,000 of income tax, of government spending on abortion. Told that no such information existed, he estimated the amount at $60, withheld it from his tax return, and said he would go to jail if necessary.
Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary officials have announced Neal F. Fisher as new president of the United Methodist institution, located in Evanston, Illinois. Presently the dean of Boston University School of Theology, the Indiana native becomes the twelfth president in the school’s 125-year history.
SUMMER SCHEDULE: With this issue we begin our summer schedule of one issue per month. The last issue was June 27 and the next one will be August 8.
