Seventy per cent of America’s people now live in the great urban centers, and pastors who are to minister in these areas where alienated and hopeless humanity is concentrated must not only understand the needs of these multitudes but also identify with their longings, their fears, and their anger. They must learn to go to the people where they are and the way they are. The city pastor who frequents only the places of unimpeachable respectability can hardly expect the needy masses to throng to his church on Sunday morning. The battle is out there. The man of God, though not of this world, must surely be in it.

The crushing anguish so present in our world is usually not apparent in a Sunday-morning or a Wednesday-evening congregation. Human distress ferments in the squalor of decaying tenement houses and at the back table of a gin mill on State Street, and boils in the core of a frenzied mob seeking vengeance on oppressors. As Nietzsche has written, “Great problems are in the street.” So men and women of God must bring to the streets the message of deliverance for the victims of sin. And they must do so with holy indignation against the social, economic, and political abuses of the day.

But the slum-dweller and the impoverished member of a minority group are not alone in their urgent need of the grace of God. There are minorities of another sort that are almost untouchable. The avant-garde intellectuals and artists live in a world so far from the average seminarian’s, and speak a language so foreign to his cars, that he may be unable to find any common ground on which to meet them. Yet there is hunger there; there is a sense of lostness, and an endless, fruitless search for identity and meaning. And at the end of every quest there is the inevitable fact of death. Camus writes of the artists’ and intellectuals’ rebellion against God: “The rejection of death, the desire for immortality and for clarity are the mainsprings of these extravagances.” Our task is to reach them with Christ’s message: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live”; “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” The simple and efficacious Gospel must be translated into terms that clarify God’s purposes in human affairs and answer the philosophy of the absurd with a redemptive message of hope, purpose, and meaning.

There is still another group whose needs must be considered. They are the faceless ones of our great middle class. They live neither in the realm of the spirit nor in the realm of the mind. Their lives are conformed to the expectations of those who determine their social and economic destiny. Their rule of life is, “The right face in the right place.” They are skillful role-players.

They affect cultural tastes they secretly detest; they entertain guests and maintain friendships they abhor. They drink because it is expected. Church affiliation and attendance is as much a social accouterment as is their membership in the country club and in the downtown knife-and-fork fraternities.

We overlook them as an object of need because they are in church on Sunday morning, they are clean and relatively well mannered, and they are not on the relief rolls. The “golden mean” governs their religious life just as it does their public life: “Don’t rock the boat.” “Take it easy.” “Don’t overdo it.” “Sure, religion has its place, but business is business.”

Many in this “lonely crowd,” as David Riesman calls them, find relief from stifling middle-class conformity in a social life of sophisticated debauchery that would be the envy of a patron of the eighteenth-century French salons. Here at our doors are pagans who must be reached with the conviction of their lostness.

The seminary student must learn by his own involvement in human affairs. His textbook may describe the problems of the quarter of a million Americans who live in prisons and reformatories, but he will never understand until he has been able to live close to these people and to feel some part of what they feel. He may read widely about racial problems and the horrors of the slums; but until he can feel the hopeless misery of the victims of prejudice and poverty and become a part of their life, he is unprepared to minister to them.

We need an extensive internship that will send these young men and women out to the prisons, the psychiatric hospitals, the university campuses, the plush resorts, and the coffeehouses; to the middle-class suburbs and to the urban and rural slums. With these raw experiences, let them come back to the classroom for reorientation and for further help in fitting these pieces of real life into a scriptural image of the ministry, so that they will be prepared for their high calling.

But in our enthusiasm let us not be misled into substituting skills and training for the quality of the man and the validity of his message. For we will not save one soul, much less the world, by the power of rhetoric or the conclusions of the social sciences. The seminary must also offer a solid, unshakable biblical and theological base for godly action on behalf of the suffering, frightened masses in our world. Otherwise all reform efforts are but houses built on sand. The man of God must be mature in his faith, rooted and grounded in the Word. He must be a man of prayer and devotion. He must be filled with an evangelistic zeal and a burden for the lost. His mission is to lead individual men to a personal experience with God through Christ, and then into the fullness of the Spirit-filled life.

This is only the beginning, however. Transformed men must transform the institutions of men. E. Stanley Jones has said, “A religion that does not start with the individual, does not start!” And then he warns, “A religion that stops with the individual, stops.”

There is a subtle temptation for us to work to relieve human suffering for the sole purpose of improving our proselytizing advantage. I am sure Jesus would never countenance one who refused to give the cup of cold water not spiked with an evangelistic message. Yet I wonder whether the Good Samaritan ever got that poor fellow saved. The Spirit-filled Christian has compassion for the total man; he is concerned for a man’s total relationship with God—body, mind, and spirit.

To those who have been unduly influenced by a morbid, deterministic dispensationalism and have no faith in God’s power in the world today, I urge a reading of more history along with the Bible. I remind them that, although our day is one of moral and spiritual decadence, eighteenth-century Europe was even worse. But a knight with a burning heart rode through English history and by the grace of God changed the moral and spiritual ethos of the British Empire. He won souls to Christ by the thousands, and the power of his influence joined that of others to vanquish human slavery, inspire child labor laws, reform the prison system, found labor unions and credit unions, and build schools, orphanages, and homes for widows. Fifty years after John Wesley’s death, his mighty influence was still felt for good in the British Parliament and his evangelistic fervor had swept two continents.

After a venerable history dating from the founding A of Harvard College in 1636, the church-related colleges of America are being required once again to reassess their purposes. Rarely have any of these colleges gone down to financial disaster. But many have surrendered their distinctively Christian mission in order to maintain a viable internal economy. The spiritual dimension has been either eroded or completely denied in many prestigious schools that were founded on the clear conviction that the Christian heritage must be transmitted along with the arts and sciences. This defection has had two main causes: the failure of the supporting churches to recognize their urgent obligation to support a distinctively Christian program in higher education, and the infiltration of secularistic approaches to the academic disciplines.

Today the population drift to cities, the explosion in scientific information, and the dramatic extension of technology into all of life are accompanied by a burgeoning demand for a college education. And the demands of personal security and the national economy, as well as the demands of the nation’s military security, bring pressures upon our young people to gain more and more education.

Yet with our phenomenal gains in higher education, the average American college student achieves a measure of intellectual maturity in complete isolation from the spiritual values that have been the basic dynamic for our free society. Any conscious attention to the Christian heritage more often takes the form of ridicule than of intelligent evaluation. It should sober us to think that Soviet universities require the same kind of ridicule of religion as part of their curricula. And judging by the behavior on some widely known American campuses, we are also failing in citizenship education. Civil disobedience as an almost compulsive pattern of protest suggests that many college men and women are ignorant of, or even hostile to, our own constitutional and democratic processes. Many years of secularism in higher education have brought us to the place in our national life where we are powerless to transform the great society into the good society at the personal level. With the notable exception of the Christian colleges, the spiritual understanding necessary to the good society is either ignored or denied on the campuses.

The responsibility of the Church of Jesus Christ is to confront the whole secular order with biblical, timeless truth. To do this, it must train its youth within a broader framework than that offered on a secular campus which inhibits free expression of the Christian faith. It is particularly in the church-related colleges that have not defected to secularization that lively discussions can take place between biblical theology and the academic disciplines. When the critics of Christian higher education—most of whom are neither teachers nor administrators—deplore the defects of Christian colleges, they should be sure they have a valid alternative to this necessary debate among Christian scholars.

What is needed for the fullest interdisciplinary dialogue is the total witness of a Christian university in which a faculty of dedicated scholars would represent the full spectrum of academic fields. Out of the best Christian thinking in such a university there would emerge a new direction for evangelical intellectuals. Here also believing scholars would be trained at the doctoral level to staff church-related colleges or to reinforce the remnant of courageous Christian teachers who on almost every campus are still a challenge to the seeking student. A university of this kind would work against mediocrity and lead Christian education and the Church to a new day by sending out a stream of committed Christian scholars and leaders.

For the present, however, the church-related colleges face both hazards and opportunities that are unprecedented. The population of the nation’s colleges now totals more than 5.3 million, with an estimated 7.3 million by the fall of 1970. The present enrollment is an increase of 10.8 per cent over 1963–64. With sixty per cent of the middle and upper-income groups anticipating college matriculation and with the new loan and scholarship provisions extending the opportunity to nearly every intellectually competent citizen, the colleges are operating in a rising market.

Yet church-related colleges cannot project their development programs on an unbroken, rising curve. For sixty years, two-year colleges have been expanding in enrollment and influence. They are now to receive a dramatic push from the federal government. The vision of “the great society” includes a community college within commuting distance of every American citizen. This will mean that many evangelical pastors will encourage their college-age young people not to leave the community and the local church. Moreover, the cost of a two-year education in a community college will be attractive to parents. As a result of the community-college explosion, church-related colleges may have to develop convincing recruitment programs if they are to fill their dormitories.

The national average cost for each student is now $1,560 in public senior colleges and $2,370 in private colleges. But a rise of 20 per cent is expected in the next five years, and a rise of 50 per cent in the next decade. As the federal and state governments increase their subsidies to public higher education, the private colleges may find themselves unable to meet mounting costs by continuing to increase fees. Unless church constituencies can be convinced that higher education within a distinctive framework of Christian philosophy is necessary and is a worthy objective for serious stewardship, church-related colleges may well be confronted with a difficult plateau existence, followed by declining-influence and enrollments.

No group in America’s history has shown a more persistent will to live than the evangelical colleges. In spite of the requiems that have been prepared for them, they continue to grow in strength and in number. The strong response to the Danforth Foundation’s study of church-related colleges and the statement of the “faith-affirming colleges” that emerged from the subsequent discussions are evidence of their convictions and their vitality (see Sept. 10, 1965, issue, page 25).

Most church-related colleges are continually re-evaluating the philosophy upon which their communities of learning are based. Clearer understanding of their purposes is providing criteria for curricular structure, faculty recruitment, student admissions, and methods of instruction.

Vital to this re-evaluation is not only the revelational truth of God in Jesus Christ but also a biblical anthropology. Secular education is defective from the Christian standpoint because it lacks a theology and because it is based on a view of man and his goals that is not above the biological level. But for Christian education, man is still “a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor.” The Christian educator is not narrower in his view of man and reality than his secular counterpart. On the contrary, he is open to the whole cosmic panorama of truth. Contemporary secularized intellectualism has not only brought us to a denial of God and the erosion of the values from which our freedoms came; it has also led man as a complex of sensate appetites into an existence devoid of transcendent meaning. Uniquely in higher education the evangelical colleges affirm the sovereignty of God, the infinite worth of the person, and the liberating and redemptive grace manifest in Jesus Christ.

In the biblical view, man cannot achieve his destiny in rebellion against God or in flight from him. Only in God’s presence does he truly find himself. And he fulfills himself only as he is reconciled to God through the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is not this the axis of all meaning for man and his world? As such, it is the central focus of concern in Christian higher education. And it is precisely because contemporary man needs to be confronted with the full spectrum of truth—both noumenal and phenomenal, natural and supernatural—that men will continue to strive for an intellectual witness through a Christian college.

Concerned Christian educators should be fully aware of efforts on the large independent and state campuses to recognize religion as an aspect of human behavior so universal in history and in contemporary society that it cannot be ignored. A case for a department of religion was made at Princeton University as far back as 1935. The faculty committee responsible for the proposal separated the curricular and academic approaches from the extra-curricular practice of religion. This pattern has been spreading across the educational scene in the past decade. Presumably the academic approaches to religion will be historical, comparative, sociological, and psychological. The practice of the Christian faith will be continued through campus chaplains, student interest groups, and church ministries near the campuses.

The church-related colleges welcome the opportunity to train undergraduate religion majors for university departments of religion. But there are few places where these students can pursue a doctoral program apart from an atmosphere wholly intolerant of the revelational postulates of the evangelical faith. In spite of this, however, evangelical educators must face the strategic challenge to prepare students for this vocational opportunity on secular campuses. They must also face the more subtle implications for the biblical faith of this acceptance by secular higher education of responsibility for reducing religious illiteracy.

The proliferation of Christian colleges and the problem of finding funds for capital facilities, compounded by the burgeoning of instructional and general costs, also call for strategic evaluation. In some instances, evangelical interdenominational colleges established in the same regions as evangelical denominational colleges compete for financial support from the same sources. Without coordination, the pattern becomes uneconomical. The evangelical cause cannot indefinitely afford the luxury of duplication and competition. To offset it, administrators and trustees could enter into cooperative ventures. Colleges could by mutual agreement divide their fields of major emphasis. They could share distinguished guest professors. They could form a group for cooperative fund-raising. They could share cultural and lecture programs, foreign seminars, and faculty interdisciplinary exchange, and articulate their common biblical philosophy convincingly.

The church-related colleges are pioneering in how to live in the new world technology has given us. Extension and continuation educational programs are being enriched by genuine spiritual dimensions. The devaluation of persons in the sprawling “megalopolis,” the erosion of authentic community, and the disappearance of transcendent meanings for life are of primary concern for evangelical Christian colleges. The burden falls on those who can communicate the Gospel in a way that will interest and reach the educated man.

The Christian colleges in this urgent time know that they must train men and women who will have the commitment, the courage, and the intellectual competence to meet the secular challenge head on. The colleges cannot do this as tradition-bound prima donnas. But their potential is unlimited if they can find new ways to add strength to strength in cooperative adventures. Such a turn of events will attract scholars of stature, students of first-rate potential, and support of the necessary size. And what is this but another way of saying that if we “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, all these things shall be added”?

The question whether the Christian college can survive under the stringent pressures of the decades ahead is deeply troubling to many friends of these colleges and to leaders in the Church. But some are asking an even more ominous question: whether the Christian colleges should survive, or whether the educational function of the Church could be better achieved within the public institution. This second question is being asked, not belligerently by those opposed to Christian colleges, but quietly and thoughtfully by some dedicated supporters of the Church and its educational program.

Before dealing with the first question, which is the main subject of this essay, testimony must be given on the second. While the educational objectives of the Church can and must penetrate into the secular and public institutions of higher education, there is nevertheless a supreme need for church-related institutions, in which the Christian religion may be taught and evangelical truth presented without inhibition or limitation. Here all truth can be integrated with the religious conviction of the Church. In such colleges, the Gospel can be presented and the relation of the biblical revelation to the whole of life can be taught. The faculty can be Christian in both conviction and profession. Young people can be encouraged to find their intellectual and spiritual maturity in Christ. And, finally, in the Christian college the Church can give its supreme testimony that its convictions are an integral part of the expanding knowledge of the universe. The Christian college and the church-related college must survive for the sake of youth, for the sake of the Church, and for the sake of society.

Not only Christian colleges but also the other independent colleges, with the exception of those that are very highly endowed, are today being threatened by external developments over which they have no control. These are, briefly, the galloping inflation of costs, the rise of the community college, the gigantic intervention of the federal government into higher education, and the paucity of qualified faculty.

Some of these factors are more critical for the Christian colleges than for the others, and the last—the paucity of qualified faculty—is one. An essential element of a Christian college is the religious dedication of faculty members, who must also be fully qualified academically. Not that the professor of physics, for example, should intersperse his lectures with theological homilies or that street evangelism must be his avocation; but he should have a profound faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. If he has this, he need not preach in class or in the streets. His faith will shine through his teaching and convey itself to the students. It is difficult to see how a college can be effectively Christian without a faculty composed of such persons.

However, personal Christian commitment is not enough. Added to this should be high intellectual attainment, evidenced by the earned doctorate and by continuing scholarship. Naturally, professors who have both intellectual attainment and Christian dedication are far fewer than those who have only one or the other. But it is striking and significant that professors having both these qualities are sought after by the great secular universities and employed at salaries far exceeding those that can be paid in the Christian colleges. The secular universities seek them out, because scholars with Christian commitment are often outstanding in teaching and in scholarship and research, and, further, because these universities desire the influence of such men within the philosophical hodge-podge of which their faculties are necessarily constituted. Recruiting such men is made easier for the universities by the conviction of some of these scholars that their evangelical testimony is more needed in the secular institutions than in the Christian colleges.

The result is that the scholar who is both dedicated to Christ and academically superior is often not available to the smaller colleges. And the Christian colleges are then caught between the upper and nether millstones. They are tempted to use dedicated Christians who are deficient in academic attainment or first-rate scholars who are non-evangelical or sometimes non-Christian. They often compromise by accepting both. The result is a blunting of the Christian witness of the colleges and a deterioration in teaching effectiveness.

In a decade or so, every sizable community will have a tax-supported college. Contrary to present claims, these will be four-year colleges. Those now functioning are already paying better salaries than the Christian colleges. These community colleges will have finer buildings and facilities, probably better faculties, and lower tuition, or none at all. Paradoxically, they may, despite their secular character, be indirectly responsible for a strengthening of Christian faith among many of their students, who, since they will continue to live at home, will not be uprooted from their churches.

The Christian college will soon be confronted with this competition not only in its own locale but also in the towns from which its resident students might come. Unless it is markedly superior in both its academic and its religious program, it may lose out.

Faculty salaries will play a much larger part in this situation than they have in the past, or than the colleges are willing to admit. The average faculty salary in the Christian and church-related colleges is about half that of the salaries in the greatest secular universities. There may have been a time when fully qualified and dedicated Christian professors preferred to serve in the smaller college. This was a time, however, when there existed a buyer’s market in college teaching, when the salary difference between the small college and the great university was not so large, when relatively more fully qualified teachers were available for both types of institutions, and when evangelical professors were less sensitive to the call of Christian mission in the universities than many now are. Whatever the reason, the day is past when an appreciable number of committed Christian instructors who were also first-class scholars could afford to choose the small college at half-salary. These men now have families to educate. While salary rates are not everything, they cannot longer be disregarded in the search for the kind of faculty essential to the Christian college. Unless the financial element is honestly faced, there is no way out of the problem.

Now, it is at this point of financial crisis that the professing Christian colleges, along with most of the other independent colleges, are making a monumental error. They are clinging to the old tradition that they can survive by begging help from the public, the churches, the alumni, or the government to finance their budget deficits. Moreover, they are making the equally grave mistake of disregarding the tremendous resources that are wasted in their traditional curricula, organizations, and calendars. There is more financial relief available to most colleges in restructuring their curricula and organization than in begging for help. Because they are not using all their resources and are maintaining conventional programs, the Christian colleges are moving toward such enormous annual operating deficits that the giving of churches, alumni, friends, and even the government will be inadequate. That is to say, the possibility that giving from all sources will be adequate to future operating deficits is most remote.

The givers will not make up these deficits because the idea is abroad—and it is absolutely correct—that in this new day the colleges can and should be self-supporting in their operations. Alumni, public, foundations, and ultimately denominational boards will reserve their giving for capital purposes, or for measures that mean academic, spiritual, or physical improvement. Rat-hole giving to make up deficits is on its way out. Even the government with its extensive grants makes no pretense of supporting operating deficits. Indeed, its contributions are very largely for buildings, the maintenance of which only adds to operating deficits. And when the tax-supported community colleges number in the thousands and tens of thousands, the political pressures of Congress and of most politicians will be more and more toward help for these public institutions. Any support now offered to the professing Christian college may be declared illegal, just as it would be for the churches of which these colleges are the educational extensions. Furthermore, for a college committed to a Christian testimony, it is quite as wrong to use the forced tax-support of non-Christians for proclamation of the Gospel as it would be for a church to do so.

There is a brighter side of the situation. The Christian and the small independent colleges can survive, even against the great odds that are coming up. But they cannot do so by constantly increasing their annual operating deficits, by spending their money for the maintenance of outmoded traditions, by sustaining curricula that are proliferated beyond all reason in futile imitation of the large universities, by employing at half-salaries twice as many teachers as are needed, by pursuing development programs which will bankrupt them with added maintenance costs, by borrowing amounts that in many colleges already exceed the total negotiable assets, and by continuing to engage in deficit spending, deficit thinking, and overbuilding.

The restructuring of a college for operational self-support and for academic superiority is very difficult. Yet it can be done, if administrators are willing to bring expense down to income, limit curricula to fundamentals, reduce the size of the faculty and administration and pay adequate salaries for fully qualified people, measurably improve the deteriorating quality of teaching and academic standards, relieve the supporting public of the burden of perennial deficits and thus release them to greater capital giving, work for the greatest possible use of the buildings, and construct needed new buildings only when they have the funds to do so. Studies in Higher Education, a non-profit enterprise dedicated to the survival of the Christian and the independent college, is presently engaged in showing trustees and administrators of such colleges how these things may be done.

Impartial educational statesmen have from time to time predicted that the Christian college will die, either by becoming a tax-supported community college without a Christian testimony, or by being replaced by the community college. But this need not happen!

All is not well with the educational ministry of the Protestant Church. In this secularized age with its explosion of knowledge as well as of population and its vastly enlarged opportunities for witness, the Church’s educational agencies are, all things considered, doing little more than holding their own. And in the battle for the mind in a day of pervasive unbelief, Protestant education is not just in danger of defeat; in many quarters it is now losing the battle. Even among youth and adults under the Church’s tutelage, commitment to supernatural Christianity with its authoritative Bible and its moral absolutes is giving way to the espousal of a relativistic ethics and a diluted theology that are essentially sub-Christian.

Christian education is primarily the responsibility of the congregation. Plans may be formulated at denominational headquarters, but the local church must carry them out. Although the practice of Christian education has ebbed and flowed during two thousand years of church history, the instinct of Christians to teach and learn has always persisted in one way or another, even during the dark ages. The strength of this instinct is evident today. New Sunday school materials, research projects, growing numbers of courses in colleges and seminaries, the emergence within recent decades of the new vocation of director of Christian education—all these bear witness to concern. Yet this concern must reach the people so as to involve them more extensively in the noble task of Christian education.

Despite all the efforts being made, much more must be done. The educational work of the Church needs not only renewal but also restructuring. Old patterns will no longer do. Just as the catechumenate in the early centuries and the schools of Reformation times gave way to other forms of Christian education, so in our day change and development must come if the Church is to be true to its Lord’s commission.

For one thing, the Sunday school is sick. In a time when the proportion of youth to the rest of the population is mounting and public and private schools are bursting at the seams, the slackening in Protestant Sunday school enrollment that began in 1960 persists. (Although the Yearbook of American Churches shows an increase of more than 800,000 between 1962 and 1963, this is chiefly the result of the inclusion of a few groups—one of which listed more than 600,000 Sunday school pupils—that were not included the year before. And if the large gains of the Mormons are deducted, hardly any increase remains.)

For almost a hundred years in America, the Sunday school has been the lifeline of the Church. To it the Church looks for new members and for an informed laity. But any minister with the temerity to give his congregation the simplest Bible test will probably be as shocked as the pastor in Southern California who tried this a few years ago (see “Biblical Literacy Test,” by Thomas Roy Pendell, The Christian Century, Oct. 21, 1959). Seminary professors know that it is futile to expect their entering students who have been under the instruction of the Church all their lives to have anything approaching an ordered knowledge of the main content of Scripture. In a book giving the results of a survey of a midwestern county, two sociologists bluntly say: “Ministers who use biblical imagery in their sermons and who refer to biblical stories in their presentations are undoubtedly failing to communicate with the majority of the members in their congregations who have no context in which to place such references. The Sunday schools seem to have been quite ineffective in communicating cognitive material to the students” (Religion in American Culture, by W. Widick Schroeder and Victor Obenhaus, New York, 1964). To be sure, factual knowledge is only part of what religious teaching should convey. Yet factual knowledge of the Bible is indispensable for Christian living. As the prophet Amos said to Israel, there is a famine in the land, a famine of hearing the Word of God.

There are, however, other results of church education than merely intellectual ones. “Thy word have I hid in mine heart,” said the psalmist, “that I might not sin against thee.” Christianity is more than moralism; it is a new, redeemed life in Christ. Yet the Bible is at the heart of morality; and when people no longer take the Bible seriously, morality sags. The prevalence of classroom cheating, sexual immorality, shady tax practices, and other cutting of ethical corners does not speak well for the effectiveness of the Church’s teaching. Our Lord’s criterion, “By their fruits you shall know them,” still stands.

What lies behind this comparative ineffectiveness? Three things come to mind—first, an inadequacy of time; second, a shift in content; third, a loss in basic purpose.

Education may be broadly defined as the changing of human beings through experience. And the experience that effects the change is of two main kinds—formal and informal. Formal education includes what goes on in class (or in church) on weekdays or on Sunday. Informal education is constantly coming to young and old through radio and television, the press, travel, and a thousand and one other influences.

As leisure time increases, the effect of these informal educational influences becomes stronger. In comparison, the time allotted Christian education in churches following the usual Sunday school pattern is obviously inadequate and clamors for action. The weekly lesson period, only a fraction of the time a child in day school gives to one subject like algebra or science, is simply no match for the formal and informal secular experiences crowding in upon his consciousness.

In former generations the Protestant home was itself a center of Christian education and thus reinforced what the Church was doing. But that day has long since passed. Even with new curricula and skilled teaching, the time for the most important of all instruction falls far short of what is needed. And with due allowance for other church-directed youth activities, the proportion of church education to secular education is still very small.

A second reason for ineffectiveness in the Church’s educational ministry is a change of emphasis. Along with the praiseworthy endeavor to bring new materials and better teaching techniques into the program, there has been in some quarters a dilution of biblical and doctrinal content. Such a shift in emphasis reflects changed attitudes toward Scripture and its authority. When the Bible is no longer received as the infallible Word of God, the compelling motive to teach it is inevitably undermined. Protestantism owes its very existence under God to the written Word. Not only so, but it was the insistence of the Reformers that every Christian be able to read and know the Bible that led to the beginnings of public education.

All knowledge and all of life can be drawn upon to illustrate Scripture, but never to the neglect of first imparting what it records and teaches. The book that has been the very mother of education demands the best kind of presentation. While there is surely a place within the Church’s educational program for such studies as church history, denominational polity, social application of the Gospel, and instruction in worship, these must be taught from a Bible-centered point of view. And as the Church moves forward, as it must, and finds ways to increase the time spent in educating its people, the Bible must remain central. In its education as in its theology, the Church needs to hold fast the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura.

Thirdly, if there is to be renewal of the Church’s teaching ministry, Christian education must ask itself whether it is really obeying the Great Commission. Although the newer translations differ from the Authorized Version in rendering the verb in Matthew 28:19 “make disciples of” rather than “teach,” a “disciple” is a learner, and the verb used in the text of Matthew carries the clear meaning of “teach.” This is reinforced by the second part of the Commission (verse 20), which uses the regular verb for “teach” (didaskō) and specifies the content of Christian teaching as “all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” And this charge to teach what Jesus taught ties the Church’s educational ministry inescapably to Scripture. It must never be forgotten that, as J. L. Leuba points out, “in teaching Scripture, Jesus was actually speaking of himself, for Scripture bears witness of him (John 5:39, 45–47)” (A Companion to the Bible, ed. by J. J. Von Allmen, New York, 1958). How then can the Church fail to ground its teaching in the book to which Jesus appealed (Matt. 4:4, 7, 10; John 10:35), and which (Luke 24:27) he taught?

Now, although Scripture with its witness to Christ is the central subject of Christian education, the word “obey” in the Great Commission must never be forgotten in the zeal to teach the Book. The command to obey distinguishes the educational ministry of the Church from academic teaching. While the latter may, and often should, be objective, Christian education always drives for commitment. The truth it expounds is truth to be done. To obey Christ involves more than essential day-by-day obedience; it also involves the initial life-changing response to the command to believe on him with which he so definitely confronted men. Thus Christian education cannot be divorced from the constant presentation of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord of the individual life.

When the Church is carrying out its Lord’s command to “make disciples” (surely another way of stating the obligation to evangelize), preaching and teaching go hand in hand. Christian education will be culpably short-sighted if it ever loses the expectation of the pupil’s persona] encounter with Jesus Christ.

There is, of course, much else in Scripture about teaching. But the principle is plain. Nothing in educational philosophy or methodology must ever divert the Church from the central emphasis of its teaching as set forth by Christ.

But the educational ministry of the Church also needs restructuring—and that in a radical way. Not that the Sunday school should be scrapped. With all its faults it still lies close to the heart of the Church’s educational ministry and is indispensable. But as the liberal arts college, while at the center of the university, cannot fulfill all the functions of the university, so the Sunday school cannot fulfill the whole of the Church’s teaching ministry.

“But why,” someone may ask, “must the educational ministry of the Church be radically restructured?” A basic reason lies in a fundamental change in American society. No longer is the Protestant ethos dominant in our culture. In what Professor Robert T. Handy of Union Seminary (New York) calls “the radical pluralism” of today, Protestantism is but one among many religious forces, even though numerically it is still in the majority. (While causes of this decline are complex, religious liberalism within the denominations has doubtless helped bring it about.) Thus the Church can no longer count upon the prevailing climate of opinion to support the teaching given in the Sunday school and in its other educational agencies.

Of the many suggestions for restructuring Christian education, these hold great promise: closer cooperation of Christian education with general education; adult Christian education; various released-time or free-time plans; home-centered Christian education; the teaching function of the pulpit; the parish school or the Christian day school.

Consider first the objective teaching of the Bible and religion in the public schools, the door for which was opened by Mr. Justice Clark’s majority decision in Abington v. Schempp (cf. “A Strategy for Christian Education,” editorial in CHRISTIANITY TODAY, May 7, 1965). Let it only be said here that, while it is not within the province of the Church to ask for such teaching in public schools, concerned church members who are taxpayers and parents of school children may and should try to persuade school boards to initiate it.

More directly related to the Church is dual enrollment, or shared time. This plan for educational cooperation of church and state has been given added stature by the Education Act of 1965. (Though some have questioned the constitutionality of dual enrollment, it seems likely that it will not be declared unconstitutional.) Under this plan, church and public school share the weekday educational time of the child. Certain subjects, such as those of a religious nature and others that are called by some educators “value subjects” (history, literature, and the like), would be taught in religious schools. Possibilities—and difficulties—abound. Think, for instance, of the possibility of weekday use of some of the many fine educational plants attached to Protestant churches that stand idle for the greater part of the week—surely a sad waste of facilities. While the Catholic Church with its parochial schools is best equipped to participate in dual enrollment, Protestants should certainly be willing to try the experiment also. The plan, though it presents complex problems, has great virtues, not the least being its confirmation of the right of parent and church to share the child’s educational time.

A problem of particular concern to evangelicals is the theological character of the teaching under dual enrollment. Though this is an ecumenical age, there are many Protestants for whom the instruction of their children under liberal or neo-orthodox theological auspices would be unacceptable. This leads to the suggestion that in communities practicing dual enrollment there be two Protestant educational centers—one sponsored by churches committed to a more liberal theology and the other by those committed to a conservative evangelical theology. Such an honest acknowledgment of basic differences would doubtless be preferable to compromising conviction or to teaching from a bland, invertebrate theology that would offend no one.

A more familiar extension into the school day of religious teaching is the released-time program, as successfully practiced in New York City since 1924 and in many other places throughout the country. In the Zorach case (1952), the Supreme Court held released time to be constitutional. It offers an important addition to the Church’s instruction of its youth; yet most Protestants seem disinclined to make use of it.

Different from released time are the various free-time plans of religious education. Among them is the three-hour Saturday morning church school taught by paid teachers. Such programs are encouraging signs of the experimentation from which advance comes.

Notice must also be taken of the Christian day school. This growing movement has both its parochial and its parent-controlled aspects. Some churches are using their educational facilities for day schools, which have historic roots in groups like the Missouri Synod Lutherans, Christian Reformed, and Mennonites, and are increasing among Episcopalians, Baptists, and others. While there is a tendency to deplore the growth of the Christian day school movement as a threat to the public schools, this kind of school is a valid option for concerned Christian parents, although it will probably remain a minority solution to the problem of Christian education.

One of the Church’s weaknesses is in adult education. Many Protestant churches ask little of candidates for membership beyond a brief declaration or reaffirmation of faith or a letter of dismissal from another church. That so often little in the way of adequate instruction is provided for adults entering its fellowship is unfortunate. The midweek service with its combination of prayer and teaching of the Word was once a means toward an instructed laity. But it has now dwindled. The Southern Baptists have their Sunday evening Training Unions, which do much for denominational solidarity; yet the amount of systematic instruction in these meetings is rather small. To be sure, there have been various interchurch endeavors to promote adult Christian education. Among them is the United Christian Adult Movement, begun in 1936 under the International Council of Religious Education, the Federal Council of Churches, and various missionary and women’s agencies. But the work of this movement, tending as it has toward such things as family counseling, though important, can hardly be called structured Christian education.

If the biblical and doctrinal illiteracy of the laity is ever to be remedied, the Church must move forward in adult Christian education. Here is a field that cries out for initiative on the part of pastors and boards, sessions, and vestries. Institutes for the study of the Bible and doctrine, groups of adults meeting in homes, weekday reading and study programs, cell groups that give time to fellowship in the Word—these are among the many possibilities (see “How to Make Adult Training Work,” p. 18). We cannot wait for youth to be taught how to “give a reason for the hope that is in [them].” If for no other reason than that there can never be good Sunday school teaching without teachers who know the Bible, we must begin now to educate adults.

As with children, not least among ways adults learn is by doing. That such lay organizations as Christian Business Men’s Committees, The Gideons, Yokefellows, Faith at Work, and The Christian Teachers Fellowship flourish shows that there is an empty place in Protestantism. These are not primarily study groups. But they engage in active Christian witness and in so doing develop in their members a real measure of biblical knowledge.

No church program of Christian education is complete if it omits the home. Few changes in our society have had more far-reaching consequences than the change in the American home. Now almost a phenomenon is the home that maintains family Bible reading and worship. Yet the family, not the school or the church, is the single most effective educational agency. Parents need the help of the Church in fulfilling their responsibility for the Christian training of their children at home. It is strange that many a parent who openly deplores the cessation of devotional observances in the public schools cannot be bothered to say grace at his table or to think about family worship. Few ministers can assume that the children of the congregation are getting any religious training at home. Yet many parents would be willing to give their children some Christian teaching if they could be shown how to do it. Home study guides, such as courses in biblical content and Christian doctrine, are needed. Perhaps the methods of programmed learning could be adapted for this purpose. In a day when the average American family has its television set going six hours a day, there must be time for prayer and reading and study of the Bible under the leadership of one or both parents.

There are other ways of renewing the educational ministry of the Church. The pulpit itself is a prime agency of Christian education, if—and the qualification is all important—the pastor knows how to expound the Word of God. Nothing must ever be allowed to crowd teaching out of the pulpit—neither life-situation preaching, nor inspirational sermons, nor evangelism itself. The pastor skilled in exposition will find none of these incompatible with opening up the Word.

The renewal and restructuring of the Church’s educational ministry stands among the foremost Protestant priorities. If some say that primacy belongs to evangelism alone, the reply must be that the evangelistic motive is implicit in Christian education and that without it Christian education is powerless to achieve lasting results. For if education has to do with the changing of human beings by experience, let it not be forgotten that the Church has committed to it in the Gospel the one message that can regenerate human beings.

To reform the Church’s role in education will make heavy demands on personal devotion and will call for sacrificial expenditure of time and money. But it must be done if Protestantism is to bear an obedient witness for Christ in this secular and materialistic society. In an essay called “Portrait of the American Mind,” Professor Henry Steele Commager says that Americans have boundless confidence in the new generation and are willing to make “almost any sacrifice for it except those required by self-restraint.” God forbid that Christians, once they are aroused to the urgent necessity for doing something about the Church’s inadequate teaching ministry, should be unwilling to make every sacrifice for this cause.

WORD AND LOOK

So much can hang upon one word—

A sword to pierce, a jewel to glow,

A stone to shatter, or a balm

To soothe a throbbing woe.

And just as much upon a look—

A sneering lip, a sparkling eye,

A blank bare-wall face, or a smile

That beams a heart’s warm cry.

Great power in little words and looks

Each other’s worlds to warm or chill.

So One Divine Word made our world;

One Look will make all still.

DOROTHY R. WEBB

When Dr. Frank E. Gaebelein became headmaster emeritus of The Stony Brook School in 1963, he again postponed some long delayed writing in order to devote several years to CHRISTIANITY TODAY as co-editor. The current issue reflects, as have other educational issues since 1963, one of his areas of special interest and responsibility, Christian education. Few educators have the broad experience Dr. Gaebelein brings to the discussion of the Church’s educational activity in America. Among the books he has written are two on religious education—Christian Education in a Democracy and The Pattern of God’s Truth, both published by Oxford University Press and both recognized contributions to the philosophy of Christian education.

Next fall we shall lose our gifted co-editor after his three full years on this journalistic front, as he takes up some projects he hopes to complete in these retirement years. Among them may be a book on Christianity and aesthetics. A lifelong mountain climber and member of various Alpine clubs, Dr. Gaebelein is also an accomplished pianist.

Throughout most of 1966 we shall continue to share the values of his association. Later this year our subscribers will be offered an anthology to which Dr. Gaebelein is now devoting some of his energies. A tenth-anniversary project, it will present The Best of ‘Christianity Today.’

You came be too careful what you say to the press. The previous day I had been interviewed by an Oslo daily and had even had my picture taken. It must have gone to my head and led to some unguarded language, for the accusing headline duly appeared: EVANGELICAL VISITOR OPEN TO OTHER POINTS OF VIEW. Methought how fortunate it was that few of my friends knew Norwegian; my evident lapse into a frightful tolerance might never be known Less selfish thoughts finally prevailed: let this, then, be an awful warning to posterity and all others interested.

Norway I found full of surprises. Here Honest to God is regarded as a curiosity piece and nothing more. The theological professors with whom I met were genuinely astonished to hear that John Robinson’s book had been taken seriously in Britain and had even made some impact in America. Let it not be imagined that this reflects either ignorance or obscurantism: Norwegians know their German theology. Norway has, moreover, experienced all the strains, controversies, and renewals so common elsewhere. Talks with various professors and church leaders elicited expressions of keen disappointment that the 1963 Lutheran World Federation congress in Helsinki had failed to produce a popular statement on the meaning for today of justification by faith.

A most significant development in Norwegian church history occurred at about the turn of the century when three liberal professors were appointed to the university theological faculty founded in 1811. Matters came to a head when the chair of systematic theology became vacant in 1903. Battle raged over this key post, culminating in 1906 with the appointment of another liberal. As a result one of the evangelical professors resigned, and in 1908 there was founded the Free Faculty of Theology (Menighetsfakultetet; literally, The Congregation’s Faculty). Here it was that Ole Hallesby, Ph.D. of Erlangen, taught from 1909 and wrote his famous evangelical works. Despite the absence of any state subsidy, but supported by voluntary gifts from the congregations, this seminary has gone from strength to strength until now, with more than 400 students, it is training 80 per cent of Norway’s theological students.

I found the church generally more conservative in Norway than in any of the other four northern lands. This was seen not least during the German occupation in 1940 when Bishop Berggrav called for unity in recognition that “it is the old unabridged Gospel which alone can save our people.” The bishops openly condemned German and Quisling outrages and attempts to make teachers and pupils join Nazi organizations. Finding their position intolerable, all seven bishops resigned as civil servants. Deans refused to be appointed to the vacant bishoprics, and 787 of 858 clergymen broke with the regime, refusing to accept salary but continuing to hold services and minister to their parishes. Scores were arrested or interned, but others carried on, sometimes amid great hardship.

The king is head of the Norwegian church and is required to profess, maintain, and protect the national polity. Norway has had surprisingly few problems in reconciling spiritual and temporal authority.

To God give all glory, to king his tax yield;

Remember that meadow and hillock and field

You have from your God and your monarch.

Although they have nearly 900 missionaries working abroad, none of the country’s twenty-three missionary societies is affiliated with the WCC; the latter is regarded as having an unsatisfactory attitude to the Bible as the Word of God. Another feature of missionary activity is its traditional link with a strong lay movement.

God is far from being nudged out of the curriculum in Norwegian schools. “The Evangelical Lutheran religion shall remain the public religion of the State,” says Article 2 of the Constitution. So close, indeed, is the bond between church and education that one government ministry deals with both areas. There is no discrimination against those who are not members of the state church, but as someone suggested, “An outspoken atheist would probably not make a very good living selling brushes at doors in south Norway’s ‘Bible Belt.’ ” (In 1952 a court case there centered around a teacher who had doubted Methuselah’s age.)

Pietism is still strong in Norway, as in Finland (the two northern lands most directly involved in World War II), but it is no longer vulnerable to the charge of “lacking in ethical seriousness” brought against it by Hans Nielsen Hauge (born 1771), who made personal Christianity come alive for so many of his fellows. Hauge was imprisoned for several years for violations of the 1741 Conventicle Act against lay preachers, repeal of which was long overdue. “If half-educated people can freely write against God’s Word for millions,” complained the Bishop of Bergen at that time, referring to the recent introduction of freedom of the press, “then surely also uneducated people who love God’s Word must be allowed to preach it freely.…” Harassed and persecuted as he was, Hauge toward the end of his life warned his followers against separatism and disorder, which strong confessionalism characterized also the Johnsonian revival of a century ago. Perhaps this explains why no substantial free church has ever existed in Norway, where the state church claims 96 per cent of the people. The evangelical still claims on good historical grounds to be the loyalist in his denomination at a time when the new Athenians (if I may coin the phrase) are restlessly casting around for theological novelty.

Novelty was in evidence also some years ago when missionaries from Utah began to microphotograph all the church books in the country for ancestor-tracing purposes. Church people objected to such records’ falling into the hands of alien religionists. The government generally tended toward a policy of non-interference but showed itself opportunistic by obtaining a copy of all films for its archives—a project previously impossible because of lack of funds.

Who will head the World Council of Churches as its new general secretary?

The decision will be made by the WCC’s Central Committee at a meeting that begins next week in Geneva. The sixteen men and two women on the nominating committee are pledged to secrecy. But speculation is rife, and most of its points to the best known ecumenical engineer in the Western Hemisphere, Dr. Eugene Carson Blake.

Endorsement of Blake has gained momentum. But he has refused to comment on widespread reports that name him as the most likely successor to the retiring W. A. Visser ’t Hooft, general secretary of the WCC since it officially began in 1948 and even before then in a provisional status. Insiders say Blake will take the job if the 100-member Central Committee votes decisively to make him the offer. In the current ecumenical era, the position could become the most prestigious in the non-Catholic ecclesiastical world.

This is the Central Committee’s second attempt to fill the post. Earlier it had assigned the responsibility of selecting a nominee to its fourteen-member Executive Committee, which came up with the name of the Rev. Patrick C. Rodger. Although he had been head of the WCC’s Faith and Order Department, Rodger, a Scottish Episcopal priest, was relatively obscure.

His nomination was made public long before the Central Committee voted on it, and some felt it had been released in such a way as to appear tantamount to election. The resulting controversy split the World Council badly. The Central Committee voted a year ago to take no action on the Rodger nomination and appointed a special nominating committee to consider more names. Rodger is technically still in the running, but few give him much chance.

The present nominating committee is believed to have considered, in addition to Blake and Rodger, Dr. Lukas Vischer, the WCC’s chief observer at the Vatican Council; Dr. D. T. Niles, general secretary of the East Asia Christian Conference; Dr. Leslie E. Cooke, head of relief work and interchurch aid for the WCC; and Bishop Oliver Tomkins of the Church of England.

The committee drew up a priority list and instructed committee chairman John Sadiq, an Anglican bishop from Nagpur, India, to contact the choices from the top on down until a person was found who was willing to accept the nomination.

Blake would seem to surmount the political barrier that might normally face a nominee from the United States. He is well acquainted with many Eastern Bloc churchmen and seems to have their confidence. He has been to the Soviet Union several times and has rubbed shoulders with world ecclesiastical leaders for years.

Blake’s age (59) is against him. If chosen, he might be regarded merely as an “interim pope” with little more than five years in office open to him. The job has life tenure, but Visser’t Hooft, in retiring at 65 despite pressure to stay on, sets a precedent. Blake probably feels, as did Pope John XXIII, that much can be done in a short span.

As expected, most of the support for Blake comes from his fellow Americans. To the surprise of no one, the Christian Century in its January 19 issue published an editorial, “We Nominate Blake,” endorsing him “not because he is a member of the Christian Century Foundation board of trustees but because he is in every way eminently qualified to lead the World Council of Churches at this critical juncture in its brief career.” Another editorial endorsement came last month from the recently inaugurated ecumenical journal in Britain, The New Christian.

Blake was born in St. Louis and as a youth was well-trained in Christian orthodoxy. He is still regarded as reasonably conservative, though his overriding passion for ecumenicity often casts theology into the shadows. A burly man with fiery temperament, Blake readily commands respect.

While on his way to a philosophy degree with honors at Princeton University, he was a varsity football guard for three years. He earned a bachelor of theology degree at Princeton Theological Seminary and took graduate work at Edinburgh’s New College. During this period, he married the former Valina Gillespie. They have no children.

Blake’s church career began with a brief teaching stint at a Christian college in India. His pastoral posts have been at Presbyterian churches in New York State and Pasadena, California. In 1951 he was elected stated clerk of the United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., a position that he has turned into a power base unprecedented in Reformed ranks.

He is famous as originator of the Consultation on Church Union, a long-range merger discussion among six top Protestant denominations. COCU had a rather spectacular start as the Blake-Pike talks, but interest has sagged. There is now widespread feeling that pressures for a super-church will produce more schism than ecumenicity.

Personalia

For the second time since the Reformation, the head of the Church of England plans to visit the pope. Dr. Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, will meet Pope Paul VI in Rome on Wednesday of Holy Week, March 23. Ramsey’s predecessor, Dr. Geoffrey Fisher, met Pope John XXIII in December of 1960.

Half a year after President Johnson’s daughter Luci converted to Roman Catholicism (see News, July 30, 1965, issue), Vice-President Humphrey’s son Robert, a Methodist, has announced plans to marry Donna Erickson, a Roman Catholic he met at Mankato State College in Minnesota. Miss Johnson plans to marry Patrick John Nugent, also a Catholic, next summer. The expected wedding in the White House would require special permission from Archbishop Patrick A. O’Boyle of Washington.

Dr. Otto Dibelius, 85, courageous foe of Nazism and Communism, announced he will retire as head of the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg at the end of March. He has been inactive since November because of a serious heart condition. His successor is to be elected at dual synod meetings in East and West Berlin.

The Presbyterian Church in Canada named the Rev. R. Malcolm Ransom its first full-time director of missionary education. He will channel to churches information on home and overseas missions.

Dr. Joost de Blank, 56, who gained fame as a foe of racial segregation while Anglican archbishop of Capetown, South Africa, is the new bishop of Hong Kong and Macao.

U. S. Senate Chaplain Frederick Brown Harris missed last month’s reopening. He’s recuperating from neck injuries and speech impairment suffered in an auto accident in Florida last October.

Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen, already fighting the Supreme Court’s re-apportionment ruling, announced he would also make its school prayer decisions an issue this session.

Oregon’s Governor Mark O. Hatfield, outstanding Conservative Baptist layman and board member of Campus Crusade, announced he’ll run for the U. S. Senate this year. Republican Hatfield is expected to take a moderate to liberal stance on most issues.

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., quit as pastor of Cincinnati’s strife-torn Revelation Baptist Church, claiming it had been captured by the “right wing,” and took over the new Greater Light Baptist Church organized by his supporters.

Protestant Panorama

The United Church of Canada urged legalization of birth control at a conference of provincial attorneys general in Ottawa. The Criminal Code makes it a crime to sell contraceptives or disseminate birth-control information. A telegram to Justice Minister Lucien Cardin was signed by the church’s council moderator, the Rt. Rev. Ernest Marshall Howse, and the Rev. J. Ray Hord, secretary of evangelism and social service.

A scale model of the new National Presbyterian Church (see above) was unveiled in Washington, D. C. The groundbreaking will be about April 1. The church will be in a ritzy neighborhood near Methodist American University and the more expensive Washington Cathedral (Episcopal), which is scheduled for completion in 1985. The capital’s most expensive religious structure is the Roman Catholic Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Miscellany

South Africa is suffering its worst drought in memory, and the government sponsored a national interfaith day of prayer for rain. The blistering summer heat that parches crops also encourages swimming, but the government is tightening up seashore segregation. Persons of different races swimming in sight of each other face fines or jail sentences. A mulatto leader charges “greedy whites” have snapped up the best beaches. In Israel, the fifteen-member municipal council elected as mayor its only Mapam Party member, Abdul Aziz Zouabi. He got his own vote and all seven Communist votes, while the seven Alignment Party members boycotted the meeting. (See December 17, 1965, issue, page 35.)

Deaths

THE RT. REV. ROMUALDO GONZALEZ-ACUEROS, 59, Episcopal missionary bishop of Cuba since 1961; in New Orleans, of cancer.

THE REV. NIKOLAI LEVINDANTO, 69, vice-president of the Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists (largest Soviet Protestant organization) and administor of Baptist work in the Baltic states; in Riga, Latvia.

DR. JOHAN AASGAARD, 89, the president who helped Americanize the Norwegian Lutheran Church and led it into the American Lutheran Church merger in 1960; of pneumonia, in Cokato, Minnesota.

Pupil placement by religion was outlawed for public schools in Celina, Ohio. Three local schools are attended mostly by Roman Catholics, and a fourth is predominantly Protestant. The court order let stand the practice of Catholic nuns’ teaching in religious garb.

Nevada’s Attorney General Harvey Dicker-son ruled unconstitutional a plan for students in Roman Catholic schools to take certain courses in public schools.

Intermarriage within a 250-family Old Order Amish community in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania, is considered the cause of an outbreak of a rare form of anemia that was fatal to at least nine children. Blood specialist Dr. Herbert S. Bowman of Harrisburg said the Amish need not marry outside their faith but should marry outside the single isolated group. This is difficult for the Amish, who keep close family ties and do little traveling because of a ban on automobiles.

As congressional hearings on the Ku Klux Klan resumed last month (see November 19, 1965, issue, page 42), former Klansmen told of KKK intimidation projects, including bombing of Methodist and Baptist buildings in Slidell, Louisiana. Other more chilling schemes faltered: statewide church burnings, militia activity against street demonstrators, and sabotage of a train carrying Mrs. Lyndon B. Johnson.

Forty-five Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders lent their names last month to the government’s war on poverty by announcing formation of an amorphous Inter-Religious Committee Against Poverty (IRCAP).

Many politicians think clergy support made the difference in putting across civil rights reforms and are anxious to rally religious backing for the poverty program. Vice-President Humphrey attended IRCAP’s birth and enthused, “The spiritual and material resources you can bring to this effort are crucial in … any ultimate victory.” Prompt praise also came from Vatican Radio.

Humphrey said IRCAP was “a manifestation of the most fundamental beliefs of our three faiths.” He quoted from Ezekiel and the Epistle of James and said “the preface of the Economic Opportunity Act was written many hundreds and thousands of years ago.”

The IRCAP opening statement said that “the persistence of involuntary poverty in a society possessing the resources and the technological capacity to eradicate it is both economically and politically indefensible and morally intolerable.…”

Churchmen and politicians of all varieties are against poverty, but there’s a lot of disagreement when it comes to specifics. The poverty war is still a hot partisan issue, with Republicans charging millions of dollars are wasted in bureaucracy and never reach the poor. Humphrey used the IRCAP platform to call that claim “hogwash.”

A key IRCAP spokesman was the Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, leader of the United Presbyterian Church and apparent front-runner to be new chief of the World Council of Churches (see page 54). Asked if IRCAP expects clergymen to back the poverty war from the pulpit, Blake replied: “I expect them to preach the faith they profess to hold. It includes this commitment.”

Church groups are already involved in poverty programs to the tune of millions. IRCAP, which received impetus from the National Council of Churches’ board last June, plans to amalgamate religious force and advise the government on how it thinks things should be done.

This has already happened locally. In many slum neighborhoods, churches have joined the political infighting to get laymen on poverty steering committees and see that the poor are properly represented in policy-making. The issue has been hotly debated in recent months, since city Democratic machines would like to dispense the millions. It was rumored the machines were out to get R. Sargent Shriver, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, but Shriver has dropped his Peace Corps responsibilities and stayed with OEO.

IRCAP intertwines with the earlier Citizens Crusade Against Poverty, a front for 125 interest groups pushing private agency involvement in OEO programs. The head of the crusade, auto union President Walter Reuther, is also on the IRCAP committee. IRCAP’s Blake also heads the crusade’s community action commission.

At the recent AFL-CIO convention Shriver declared that although several years ago it was “practically impossible for a federal agency to give a direct grant to a religious group, today we have given hundreds without violating the principle of separation of church and state.”

One Washington religious lobbyist who favors a more traditional separation grumbled, “It’s bad enough to do it without bragging about it.”

Second Front In Smut War

Federal prosecutors won a key conviction last month that opened a second front in their war on smut. Rather than hitting a California publisher at the point of origin, they indicted him in Sioux City, Iowa, where his stuff had been shipped.

A jury convicted Milton Luros, his wife, and seven employees under a 1958 amendment to U. S. anti-obscenity laws that permits prosecution at delivery points. Luros’s lurid literature included L Is for Lesbian, Lesbian Interlude, Lesbian Alley, Lesbians in White, Lesbian Sin Song, Two Women in Love, The Three-Way Apartment, Popular Nudism, Nudist Week, Urban Nudist, and Teenage Nudist.

A special panel of the U. S. Court of Appeals in Washington is to decide whether the 1958 amendment is constitutional and whether it was applied fairly in the Iowa trial. Defense attorneys said the government purposely picked a rural district in order to win conviction.

The U. S. Supreme Court is currently pondering the merits of several big obscenity cases. Its previous rulings have confused jurists, and enforcement varies widely across the country.

Sick Transit

New York City clergymen, often outspoken on current issues, said little in their sermons when a transit crisis hit home. Religious News Service, based in the city that was paralyzed thirteen days by a transport workers’ strike, said preachers were “helpless and baffled.” Even those often sympathetic to organized labor were among the hesitant, perhaps reflecting the public’s general disenchantment with the union.

The union tried to get a department of the Protestant Council of New York to urge that union President Michael Quill be released from jail, where he had been sent for disobeying a no-strike injunction. But council chief Dan Potter said, “This is a power struggle in which the churches are not in a position to be of help.”

Later, Potter joined Catholic and Jewish leaders to front a 200-member committee that backed Mayor John Lindsay’s three points for settlement. They held a press conference and special prayer services.

As in last fall’s power blackout, people pitched in. Ministers dipped into welfare funds to help members unable to work. Harlem churchmen organized car pools to get people to jobs. The Salvation Army ran round-the-clock transportation for hospital workers and served 240,000 cups of coffee and snacks to people waiting in impossibly long lines for commuter trains.

Church attendance was down all over the city, particularly at big downtown churches that draw from outside Manhattan.

Some reporters consider the Roman Catholic archdiocese an integral part of the establishment Lindsay hopes to unseat. In this vein, the Washington Post’s Flora Lewis wrote that in the strike Lindsay was “the general on one side. The general on the other side has never appeared, and probably does not exist, except as ‘the way tilings have been done around here’ and the lawyers, businessmen, union leaders, politicians and churchmen who have been doing them.”

Youth For Christ At 21

Youth for Christ is now 21 years old; its adolescence is over and its voice has changed. At a convention last month in Seattle, evangelists to teen-agers talked about racial integration, the inner city, and internationalism.

The Rev. Sam Wolgemuth, 51-year-old former Brethren in Christ bishop now entering his second year as YFC president, told local reporters: “Before Youth for Christ becomes any larger, or gets any busier, we feel a sense of responsibility … to look at our adult selves, to evaluate our motives and purposes, to deepen our spiritual resources.”

YFC began with one full-time staff member—Billy Graham—and now has 359 in fifty-one nations (half of these are ordained). Counting the semi-autonomous local “rally” units, it spends more than $3 million a year.

Wolgemuth admits, “We haven’t done very much significant work in the inner city,” but hopes this will change. The YFC stronghold in the New York City area, for example, has been middle-classy Long Island, but an invasion of Manhattan is in the works. Another teen evangelistic group, Young Life Crusade, has undertaken a similar migration.

When you talk about inner city you’re talking about Negroes. YFC has looked in the mirror and seen a white face staring back. So last September it hired the Rev. William Panell, its first Negro staffer (see “Negroes as Neighbors,” page 38, January 21 issue). Another sign of the times: last month’s big rally in Birmingham, Alabama, which drew 6,000 young people, was integrated. Of integration, Wolgemuth said, “We are committed, no matter what it costs us. It is the Lord’s will.”

Some observers sense a toning-down of YFC’s exuberant, rah-rah atmosphere and note that its magazine and clubs now carry the post-teen label “campus” even though it’s a high school movement. But the light touch is still an important ingredient in meetings designed to draw in the apathetic or unchurched teen-ager.

Next fall, some two dozen married couples will inaugurate the new Y-2 program, an evangelistic Peace Corps in which college graduates will spend two years working with YFC’s native staffers overeas. Its director is Dr. David H. Paynter, California school administrator credited with starting the conservation centers under the U. S. Office of Economic Opportunity.

On Washington’s Birthday the Lifeline Department, which works with delinquents, will dedicate its newly built boys’ home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on farmland where the first president lived as a youth.

John Haywood spent years preparing for a special ministry to lepers in Viet Nam. Though caught between Viet Cong and U. S. Marines, his hospital near Da Nang, the Hylac Vien (Happy Garden) Leprosarium, was completed this year and survived periodic shellings. Symone, a Swiss missionary he married last February, was expecting their first child.

So the future was full of promise on January 8 as the quiet, red-haired 29-year-old missionary set out for Hue to see U. S. officials about getting livestock to feed his patients. Failing to hitch a plane ride with U. S. Marines, he started out with a convoy along the perilous road north.

Three miles out of Da Nang, in a dense jungle area where the road narrows, the Viet Cong guerrillas opened fire, killed three Vietnamese soldiers, and crippled two military vehicles.

As Haywood got out of his Microbus to investigate, a machine-gunner in the ditch cut him down with three bullets to the head and three in the chest. He died instantly. One investigator said Haywood apparently tried to help somebody and just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time.

His body (minus papers, watch, wallet) was recovered later that day by Marines, and taken back to Da Nang. On January 10, Haywood was buried in a Christian and Missionary Alliance cemetery at Da Nang as American soldiers looked on.

The day after the funeral, the widow gave birth to a daughter and named her Jacqueline. Mrs. Haywood announced she will remain at her missions post.

John Haywood was the first missionary murdered in Viet Nam since two Wycliffe Bible translators were slain in March, 1963, and the first since military escalation began making it a new war early last year. Ironically, the murder came during a lull in fighting and a halt in U. S. bombing raids on the North.

Another bit of irony: Haywood had been near much greater danger for the better part of three years while setting up the leprosarium eight miles south of Da Nang.

Haywood, a native of Birmingham, England, operating under the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade, ran the hospital by remote control, since it was in an unsecured area 200 yards from Viet Conginfested jungles. He stayed at a clinic at the Marble Mountains, as close to the hospital as he could get. The five native staffers who lived at the hospital itself ferried patients and supplies to and from Haywood.

In a December prayer letter, Haywood summarized his feelings: “Things are bad, but not impossible.” After all, the very existence of the hospital was a miracle. The site was granted by the Saigon government after six frustrating years of negotiations. Last August, while the newlywed Haywoods were in Hong Kong getting special training in treating leprosy, the Viet Cong threatened to destroy the hospital because they had seen American officers there presenting a gift. One night hundreds of VCs showed up with tools to level the fourteen-building compound. After hours of pleading, the Reds decided to leave it alone.

The hospital is in an area Marines hope to take over. During a Marine sweep through the area last March, twenty-nine Viet Cong soldiers escaped capture by hiding in beds at the leprosarium.

The hospital has 200 patients and is the only leprosy treatment center in the northern part of South Viet Nam. Gordon Smith, WEC administrator for Viet Nam now on American furlough, said the future is uncertain. Haywood had been through Bible college in England, learned Vietnamese, and studied the disease. A replacement with these abilities will be hard to find.

“The war has played havoc with our work, but it is going ahead,” he said. “No missionary can go out into the countryside, so nationals do the job, and they are magnificent.”

Churches Hike Viet Nam Relief

Next month American Protestant groups will launch a greatly expanded relief program in Viet Nam, all of it supervised by the Mennonite Central Committee.

So far, some $350,000 has been earmarked for this year’s effort, mainly aimed at helping war refugees. The total compares with only. $32,500 expended in 1965. Church World Service hopes to provide the MCC with $250,000 from its 1966 budget, and Lutheran World Relief seeks to raise $50,000. The rest, it is hoped, will come from Mennonite and Brethren in Christ contributors.

During the next eight months, forty-five new volunteers, including five doctors and six nurses, will go to Viet Nam to join the eleven already there. Seventeen of the forty-five new volunteers will be recruited by the MCC and the rest by CWS. They will expand already existing relief efforts in Saigon, Nhatrang, and Pleiku and begin projects at five more locations.

The MCC continues to be the only Protestant relief agency handling government surplus commodities in Viet Nam. During 1966 it expects to receive 4, 250,000 pounds of dried milk powder, flour, wheat, cornmeal, and vegetables. Drugs are being dispensed also by MCC.

An MCC spokesman says the “danger” of having the organization’s relief and service efforts identified with the U. S. government’s total military and psychological strategy to win the war “continues to pose serious problems.”

Wanted: Christian Canteens

The National Association of Evangelicals is trying to rally support for the establishment of Christian servicemen’s centers in Viet Nam. There are numerous evangelistic programs in operation for the nearly 200,000 American GI’s there, but not a single church-related canteen or outdoor recreational area. If funds become available, NAE plans to set up such centers, beginning in Saigon, through its Christian Servicemen’s Fellowship.

Pressures On The President

From New York’s big Interchurch Center last month came a new pressure campaign for a negotiated settlement of the Viet Nam war. United States clergymen found themselves in the middle. Leading pastors all over the country were telephoned and asked to rally support for the administration’s peace effort and against pressures on President Johnson to renew bombing of North Viet Nam.

The campaign originated in an office rented by the recently organized inter-religious “National Emergency Committee of Clergy Concerned About Viet Nam.” One of its members was identified as Richard Cardinal Cushing, who later dissociated himself, asserting he “was merely requested to permit the use of my name in support of the peace program of Pope Paul VI and President Johnson.”

Another group of clergymen, spearheaded by the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, announced they were forming an “International Committee of Conscience on Viet Nam.”

Death Follows Kashmir Pact

Leaders of India and Pakistan signed a pact on Kashmir last month that may ease religious tensions (see “Christians Caught in Kashmir Crossfire,” October 8, 1965, issue).

The agreement in Tashkent was regarded as a diplomatic triumph for the Soviet Union, which arranged the meeting, and it was celebrated with drinking and dancing girls. Hours later, India’s teetotaling Prime Minister Shastri awoke from his sleep, crying, “My father! My God!” and shortly after died of a heart attack.

The pact with Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan which climaxed Shastri’s career calls for withdrawal of troops to last summer’s lines by February 25, restored diplomatic relations, and peaceful settlement of future disputes. Christian spokesmen in the West rejoiced, but many Pakistanis were outraged at a thaw with India without settlement of basic Kashmir issues. Opposition politicians blasted the agreement, and two persons died in a Lahore riot. Pakistan insists on a free vote, believing Kashmiris would unite with their Islamic nation rather than with India, which is mainly Hindu.

Strife often seems a way of life for Protestants. But lately they’ve been on unaccustomed sidelines watching America’s Roman Catholics wrestle with new furies unleashed by Vatican Council II.

The council stirred up the present ferment in several ways. Liberals have a new boldness in challenging the church establishment. Conservatives claim the same freedom to lament the council’s effects. And the liberal spirit has opened up discussions in private and a thorough airing of them in public.

Consider these strange results in recent weeks:

• The nation’s first university teachers’ strike occurred not at bombastic Berkeley but at St. John’s University in New York City, largest Catholic college in America (13, 000 students at two campuses). The strike was not just a labor dispute over mass faculty firings but a revolt against the whole design of Catholic higher education.

• A decade after John Courtney Murray was muffled in private for ecumenical wandering, Ave Maria, a weekly of the Congregation of Holy Cross, published eleven hard-hitting case histories of latter-day “silenced priests.” Most were reassigned or restricted because of pacifist and civil rights activities.

• In the most celebrated silencing, Daniel Berrigan, a pacifist Jesuit, was subtly sent to South America for three months of journalistic penance on the eve of a big pacifist meeting, and after David Miller, one of his proteges, started the draft-card burning craze. The Berrigan case inspired an unprecedented uproar, with heated diatribes, newspaper ads, and pickets at Cardinal Spellman’s office.

• Another silenced priest broke his silence and announced resurgence of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement he founded. The Rev. Gommar A. DePauw became the new spokesman for Catholic fundamentalists who oppose the “Protestantizing” of the church after Vatican II, and managed to draw three cardinals into an international dispute over who was responsible for his revolt to the right.

Then there were a bishop and priest trading verbal blows during the strike by California grape-pickers and perennial conscientious objection on subjects like birth control. (A high French churchman flatly rejected church teaching in a recent Paris radio program.)

In Mendoza, Argentina, twenty-seven progressive priests have quit diocesan offices, and a spokesman says they won’t return until Archbishop Alfonso Buteler, 75, implements Vatican II reforms.

The St. John’s fuss had been in the making since March, but for some reason the administration brusquely dumped 31 of its 510 teachers in mid-semester. Ten of those fired during the Christmas holiday were later allowed to teach through June.

In retaliation, the United Federation of College Teachers, whose local chapter is headed by the ousted Rev. Peter O’Reilly, called a strike of the non-fired teachers. Some students also boycotted classes in sympathy when the vacation period ended last month. The two sides varied widely on how many people stayed away.

The school executives have been remarkably uncommunicative through the furor, but apparently they considered some of the teachers incompetent and others guilty of insubordination and unprofessional conduct. Teachers had been seeking fixed tenure, union recognition, higher salaries, and a role in running the university.

Despite some recent concessions to these complaints, the university is under investigation by the American Association of University Professors (which could censure the school) and the city labor department. The National Labor Relations Board refused to get involved because St. John’s is a non commercial employer.

Most of the dismissed teachers are laymen, although one is Msgr. John G. Clancy, formerly of the Vatican Secretariat of State.

One of the loudest dissidents is a former philosophy professor, Dr. Rosemary Latter, who was once demoted for criticizing Thomas Aquinas, for centuries the honorary clean of Catholic colleges. She contends that “the Catholic Church, or any other church, ought not to operate a university,” because it seeks to propagate dogma. She sees this as the wave of the future for Catholic colleges and points out that most Protestant ones have already made the break. O’Reilly, less extreme, regrets that the church often reduces universities to “indoctrination centers.”

While intellectual liberals seek no-holds-barred education, conservatives are also vocal. DePauw’s group is the most tangible expression of grass-roots discontent over church changes, particularly over what he calls “hootenanny liturgy,” “ecumania,” services attended by both Catholics and Protestants, and “indifferentism”—the idea that Protestant-Catholic differences aren’t significant. He supports the Vatican II documents but says they have been distorted by liberal Catholic journalists and theologians.

Although DePauw is the only priest in the movement, he claims support from thirty bishops and a top Vatican official (unnamed) as well as a vast majority of Catholic laymen.

When he announced plans to open a New York office last month, the 47-year-old Belgian said Cardinal Ottaviani, leader of arch-conservatives at Vatican II, had arranged to transfer him from the jurisdiction of Baltimore’s Cardinal Shehan to that of an Italian bishop. That bishop said Cardinal Spellman had asked help for DePauw. Spellman denied this and said he doesn’t want the Catholic Traditionalist Movement in New York. Meanwhile, Shehan’s office said it has no word of any transfer.

A previous DePauw-Shehan struggle is one of Ave Maria’s eleven cases. Several other disputes involve agitation against Los Angeles’s James Francis Cardinal McIntyre for conservative racial policies. Other cases affected priests active in civil rights in Cambridge, Maryland; Selma, Alabama; Albany, New York; and Milwaukee (see November 5, 1965, issue, page 56).

But Daniel Berrigan overshadows them all. The publicity is natural, with the interest in Viet Nam issues and Berrigan’s visibility as one of the handful of Catholic pacifists. Also, his equally pacifist brother Philip had been moved from a seminary post to a city parish last April and told to keep quiet about Viet Nam.

When the Lutheran co-chairman of Clergy Concerned About Viet Nam, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, revealed that Berrigan had been told to quit the organization, Berrigan was discovered at Georgetown University preparing for a three-month assignment in Latin America for Jesuit Missions magazine, of which he is associate editor, and unwilling to say anything. The hurricane of commentary and the unprecedented picketing of Spellman followed. The Rev. Robert W. Gleason of Fordham University said bitterly. “The real issue in this vicious, totalitarian act is: Is it still possible for a committed Christian to remain in the Roman Catholic Church?”

More temperate reactions constitute a serious reconsideration of the role of obedience in the church. Among issues raised: During Rome’s current transition, should a priest obey a Vatican document or an unreconstructed superior if they conflict? Is the hierarchy afraid those involved in social action may step on the toes of well-heeled contributors? How great is the “psychological distance” between a bishop and a slum priest?

Germany: Tax Tremor

West Germany’s Constitutional Court has overthrown a part of the government’s collection of taxes for churches. The court said that a husband who is either an atheist or a member of a church other than the major Protestant denominations and Roman Catholicism need not pay the church tax if his wife has no income. The church levy is estimated at $600 million a year, the biggest source of income for the major churches.

Separation of church and state, made a constitutional principle in Germany in 1919, has not been followed strictly in West Germany. In officially atheistic East Germany the church tax was abandoned years ago.

Scotland: Kirk Secrecy

In Scotland, one popular daily can always be certain of boosting its circulation by a dire warning calculated to alarm the country. One day last month it nudged Rhodesia and Viet Nam off the front page with the headline, “BISHOPSagain:SECRET PLOT.”

Other papers related less emotionally that conversations had been resumed between Presbyterians and Anglicans working toward a United Church in Scotland.

An official joint statement said: “Originally it was anticipated that the full conference would meet again in September 1966, but … it was agreed that, over large areas of doctrine, sufficient agreement had been reached for the full conference to come together in January.” A previous “Bishops Report,” which advocated church union featuring bishops-in-presbytery, had been rejected by the Scottish General Assembly in 1959.

Plot or not, secrecy did surround the meetings, a fact bitterly criticized by some Church of Scotland ministers. One presbytery moderator declared, “If the linen cannot be washed in public, it is not clean.”

Another critic was John Knox’s current successor at historic St. Giles’ Kirk, Dr. Harry Whitley (who was once described by an ecumenically minded colleague as “the greatest single non-theological factor in church disunity”). Commenting on a reported scheme to give the Kirk bishops, Whitley described it as “verging on the arrogant, because it discredits the entire ministry of the Church of Scotland.” Progress was not possible, he averred, until things were “done in the open.”

The Kirk-owned British Weekly scoffed at the suggestion that bishops are to be “foisted” on the Presbyterian establishment, and pointed out existing safeguards against precipitate action.

It seems clear, however, that the emphasis on secrecy has boomeranged. Conference officials were acutely embarrassed that the contents of a “private and confidential document should have got into the possession of a newspaper at whose hands bishops have in the past received rather less than sympathetic treatment.” This document put forward for discussion a scheme that would irrevocably give the Kirk bishops who alone could ordain future ministers.

Given the Anglican view, the basic question between the two denominations appears to be simple: On what terms will the Scots accept bishops? For better or worse, Scottish reaction has changed very little from that of John Davidson four centuries ago: “Busk [dress] him, busk him as bonnilie as ye can … we see the horns of his mitre.”

J. D. DOUGLAS

Worldly Laymen In Chicago

“God calls all men and women to committed witness and action in all the dimensions of our daily lives. We live in the world, and we are in no way separated from it. We must work out our ministry in the structures of everyday experience, at work and at leisure, in family and neighborhood relationships, as buyers and consumers, and as politically responsible citizens.”

Thus begins a “message” from the mid-January Conference on the Ministry of the Laity in the World, convened in Chicago by the National and Canadian Councils of Churches. A secular citified ideology was evident throughout the meeting, which set forth the “new layman” in his ministry as a man of the world and a secular leader in the Church.

The convention of 450 delegates (85 per cent laymen) was the second of its kind. The first, in Buffalo, New York, in 1952, studied “the Christian and his daily work.”

Diverse views became apparent during voting on the message at the final session. The incident began when a motion was made to change this sentence: “We urge that the churches, without delay, take the necessary steps to make their membership open to all men, regardless of ethnic, racial or economic status.”

The proposed amendment, which did not pass, would have inserted a phrase: “… to make their membership open to all who accept the Lordship of Jesus Christ, regardless …”

A spokesman for the Message Committee quickly said that the intent of the sentence was not to point to religious issues but to indicate the Church’s opposition to prejudice. He did not offer a conditioning clause to demonstrate the need for prospective members to agree with church doctrine.

Earlier, Dr. Hans H. Walz, general secretary of the German Kirchentag, a laymen’s movement, expressed the mood of the conference, saying Christian faith and the secular world are partners in a common effort. Christians, he asserted, are “called to understand the nature and change of this society” and must face the ministry of the laity as the ecumenical obligation and promise of our age.

Surveying developments in the Roman Catholic laity, Dr. Martin H. Work, executive director of the National Council of Catholic Men, contended the second Vatican Council made laymen as responsible for the Church’s well-being as clergymen, regardless of their church rank.

He said the layman is now at the center of the universal church. By virtue of this “first specific legacy” of Vatican II, he said, “laymen must use their knowledge, competence, or outstanding ability” to express their opinions on things that affect the good of the church.

Bishop Stephen F. Bayne, Jr., first vice-president of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council, said laymen must discover “what God is doing in the world,” “identify with his purpose,” and serve the world rather than the institutional church.

Focusing on the social consequences of revolutions in education, Dr. Glenn A. Olds, executive dean of the State University of New York, said ministering laymen should resist the deepest “segregation—that of the sacred and secular, idea and action, belief and life.” The current revolution in higher education has turned the traditional values upside down, he suggested. It has inverted the Hebraic-Christian views of life and learning, necessitating a new science of values.

Dr. Richard Fagley, executive secretary of the World Council of Churches’ international affairs commission, further urged Christians to scrap static ideas and become personally involved in the continuing revolution in matters of war and peace. He described tensions between North and South and between East and West.

H. WILBERT NORTON, JR.