A number of Christian organizations send out monthly prayer reminders. They usually include specific requests and name individuals and their needs. Some of us are convinced that God has answered prayer in the cessation of fighting in Biafra. But many other prayer needs remain. Perhaps a reminder of some items still on the agenda would be helpful. Let us continue to pray for Biafra, asking God to erase the stains of the conflict and bring healing to these people. Viet Nam still looms large on the horizon, and we should call on God daily for the resolution of that struggle. The Israeli-Arab dilemma, one that cries out for peace and justice, certainly has a place on the list. The race issue—including the urgent necessity that Christians manifest the love of Jesus Christ, black for white and white for black—greatly needs our prayers. We should pray particularly for the resolution of the school desegregation situation, which threatens another harvest of hate.

Most of all we need to pray for a great spiritual awakening in our land. Each of us should ask God to awaken us, to do something fresh in our local congregations, to renew the Church, and to bring multiplied thousands of unsaved people into the fellowship of the redeemed. Let’s pray!

“Laugh-in” recently presented its “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate” award to state automobile-license bureaus that sell names and addresses for directmail advertising. I have no idea whether this is the source of the vast quantities of junk mail I receive; perhaps such mail simply represents one of the occupational hazards of the ministry. The invitations to join Hefner’s Bunny Clubs at a reduced rate I can stand (they are invariably well printed); what I have great difficulty in tolerating is the not inconsiderable quantity of politically rightist propaganda misdirected to me. Behind it seems to lie the thoroughly fallacious assumption that anyone who is “conservative” theologically must of course believe that the United States is “God’s country” and must join the crusade to “bring America back to the Christian political philosophy of the Founding Fathers.”

That this viewpoint is by no means limited to pamphleteers was evident when I received as a Christmas gift from an evangelical publisher Benjamin Weiss’s book, God in American History, whose preface sets the tone of the entire volume: “The purpose of this book is to present documentary evidence that the source of our nation’s strength from its beginning has been faith in God.… Schools, colleges, charitable institutions, hospitals, orphanages, and other institutions are monumental proof of the Christian character of the United States.”

Now there is an element of truth in these claims. As the dean of American church historians, William Warren Sweet, pointed out in his epochal work Religion in Colonial America, the biblical orthodoxy of seventeenth-century colonists cannot be disputed, nor can the religious motivations leading to Puritan and Pilgrim settlement in the new world. Such influence continued in the eighteenth century: “between 1717 and the Revolutionary War some quarter of a million Ulstermen came to America” (J. G. Leyburn, The ScotchIrish: A Social History), and these Ulster Scots were the products of a strict yet dynamic Presbyterian confessionalism. Moreover, the “natural rights” theory underlying the Declaration of Independence had its direct source not in the thought of French philosophes but in the work of Christian philosopher John Locke, and his ideas in this regard can be traced back to medieval Christian “natural law.” Thus the efforts of Mrs. O’Hare and her ilk to rewrite American history in unqualifiedly atheistic terms are doomed to failure.

But what about the opposite viewpoint with which we began—the view that equates America with “God’s country”? This stands no greater chance of success, and in fact turns out to be a kind of reverse mirror image of Mrs. O’Hare (just as extreme left and extreme right tend to display the same mentality across the political spectrum). The most influential Founding Fathers of the eighteenth century were not Christian in any biblical sense of the term: they were either outright deists or mediating religious liberals.

Among the deists were Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin. Jefferson had so little respect for the Scriptures that he created his own Bible—the so-called Jefferson Bible consisting of the ethical teachings of the New Testament (with the miraculous and divine aspects of Jesus’ life carefully excised). Julian P. Boyd’s account of The Spirit of Christmas at Monticello is a chilling barometer of the kind of religion maintained by one who endeavored, in his own words, “to shew by example the sufficiency of human reason.”

Paine’s Age of Reason set forth the religion of deism as a specific alternative and corrective to historic Christianity. The “Book of Nature” was now to replace the “Book of Scripture,” and Paine devoted the entire second half of his work to a demonstration of alleged errors, contradictions, and immoralities in biblical religion.

As for Franklin, though his motion in behalf of morning prayer at the Constitutional Convention in 1789 has led some to speculate that he experienced Christian conversion before his death, there is no doubt that deism and not Christian belief informed his political action during his career. George Whitefield found it necessary to confront Franklin with the claims of Christ throughout their long acquaintance. Wrote Whitefield on one occasion: “As you have made a pretty considerable progress in the mysteries of electricity, I would now humbly recommend to your diligent unprejudiced pursuit and study the mystery of the new birth.”

If outspoken deists were few in number among the Founding Fathers, their influence was nonetheless considerable. Their philosophy of the natural goodness of man entered directly into the foundation documents of the nation. And the opponents of deism among the Fathers of our country were not so much spokesmen of historic Christianity as advocates of religious liberalism who considered deism too radical. The liberals themselves “generally held an Arian view of Jesus” (H. S. Smith, American Christianity, I [1960], 487), and therefore found deistic anthropology quite hospitable.

In many ways the American frontier experience reinforced the anthropocentric self-confidence instilled by the Founding Fathers. F. J. Turner observed the “do-it-yourself” kind of religion which so easily developed in a frontier situation where self-reliance was the prime virtue. Americans have not generally been known for a sense of unworthiness or a willingness to accept aid from others—though such attitudes are fundamental to the Christian Gospel (“Except ye become as little children …”; “I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance”). Bertrand Russell shrewdly points up an American characteristic of which Americans themselves are often oblivious: “If Job had been reincarnated as an inhabitant of New York, and had been twitted, as the original Job was, with the great size of Leviathan and Behemoth, he would have been unimpressed, and would have replied: ‘Gee, they ain’t half as big as a skyscraper’ ” (The Impact of America on European Culture, 1951, pp. 9, 10).

In reality, ours is no more “God’s country” than is any other part of this sin-impregnated globe. We are not the Israelite theocracy repristinated, nor are we the pinnacle of Christian civilization. What we have accomplished positively as a nation is due, not to ourselves, but to God’s grace. And for our Hiroshimas and My Lai massacres we stand under the wrath of the Almighty just as others do for their Pearl Harbors and Buchenwalds. Perhaps the judgment against us is even greater, “for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.”

Let us therefore demythologize our American religion, cease our presumptive removal of motes from the eyes of other nations and ideologies, and return to the Christ who stands in judgment (and—praise heaven—in grace!) over the history of all peoples.

JOHN WARWICK MONTGOMERY

A consumer revolt is confronting 900 church-related colleges that educate nearly a million young people each year. Church colleges “have been institutionally oriented,” says Ted Cooper, Association of Admissions Counselors executive, “assuming that it would forever be the institution that would call the signals, and if consumers like it or not, it would all work anyway.”

But it’s beginning not to work. The students that church colleges recruit may be slow to picket, but they are quick to transfer; low costs, high academic quality, and few or no rules at public schools are strong selling points. So small, private colleges, already struggling to raise academic standards and lower tuition, lose students—and income.

One reason for that loss, suggests Cooper, is poor management. Some church-related colleges—College of Emporia and Baker University in Kansas, Tarkio College in Missouri, and Trinity University in Texas for example—are succeeding, but even efficient management may not draw enough donations to operate the colleges, let alone improve their facilities.

An educational consulting firm assisting several Roman Catholic colleges and universities estimates that the average Catholic liberal-arts college must raise about $4 million in the next five years. “To raise such a sum for purely operational needs,” the consultants note, “is a staggering task to an institution whose annual budget is probably only $1.5 million.”

Christian College for women in Columbia, Missouri, changed significantly, hoping to improve its financial situation. Last summer the college, which is loosely related to the Disciples of Christ, advertised nationally offering to name itself after anyone who would donate $5 million. When no one did, trustees changed the name anyway to Columbia College. “Always before people assumed that because of our name we were completely supported by the church, when actually 90 per cent of our income is from student fees,” says college president W. Merle Hill. “At least now we won’t turn people off before we can even talk to them.”

Although Columbia had already relaxed chapel and other requirements and is going coeducational, the financial problems remain.

One source of income many private educators are beginning to consider is federal support. Father Clarence W. Friedman of the National Catholic Education Association anticipates government scholarships students can use at the schools of their choice. But church colleges must hurdle some obstacles before they get federal funds. Last month fifteen Connecticut residents challenged in court the allocation of such funds to four Catholic colleges.

As long as such hurdles stand between them and federal aid, church colleges must look elsewhere for ways to improve academic quality. Church aid is usually minimal at best,¹Particularly for private Negro colleges. Most are affiliated with churches less affluent than predominantly white denominations. Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, for example, gets a token $4,000 in AME Church support. Negro colleges also suffer faculty losses when large universities tap top teachers. Further, black alumni rarely become rich enough to offer their alma maters significant financial support. so some schools are sharing faculties and facilities. Others are changing curricula to eliminate unnecessarily small classes. Still others are lowering admission standards—and usually sacrificing academic quality as well. The most likely antidote for these ills may be aggressive action to keep the students they have and to attract more. But that’s not easy. One method is to undergo an “image adjustment.”

Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, has become a swinger among American Lutheran Church colleges since it began changing five years ago, says John Norton in the National Observer. The college’s new look includes dances in the college fieldhouse, smoking privileges for women as well as men, and a governing body that is half students to decide campus discipline and to influence curriculum, budget, and development committees. It excludes compulsory chapel attendance and dormitory hours for all except freshmen women. Students still must take some religion courses, but professors, Norton notes, “are not dogmatic.”

With the enrollment just over 2,000, Luther’s administrators have a different problem: they wonder what to do with too many rather than too few students.

Luther is not among the top ten Christian colleges determined by a survey of deans of students of some colleges mostly linked to conservative church groups (see box). Many of the colleges that made the list have altered little except, perhaps, their rules about theater. Biola maintains a movie taboo; Bethel, on the other hand, allows both movies and dancing. None permits drinking or smoking; some list cheating, drugs, and profane language as “forbidden.” Nearly all require (or expect) attendance at chapel services held at least twice a week, and most ask students to sign a pledge agreeing to abide by the rules.

Altering images may produce mixed blessings for many church-related colleges; alumni and constituents sometimes frown on “liberalizing” trends—and put their money where their smile is. But to patch up consumer leaks, church colleges do need—in a worn word—relevance. To keep students without alienating donors is indeed to sail between Scylla and Charybdis. At the same time, the ship of higher education must not run aground in shallow water or, when it flies the evangelical flag, veer from a commitment to biblical truth.

JANET ROHLER

California’S Fourth ‘R’: Board Of Education Flap

Religion, of sorts, has become a controverted fourth “R” for California’s schools.

In a stormy Los Angeles session this month the State Board of Education adopted “morality guidelines” that call, in part, for classroom recognition of “the Judeo-Christian heritage and its biblically derived teachings” as “the prominent … moral influence … for many Americans.” The guidelines—a reference for textbook publishers, curriculum planners, and teachers—also say that it is the job of the schools to “supplement” the training and moral and spiritual values offered by the home and religious institutions.

Earlier, the board had composed a “Science Framework” that gives creationism equal scientific status with other theories regarding the origin of life.

The morality issue erupted last year after many teachers inquired about the specific meaning of a section of the California Education Code. The code decreed that they teach “the principles of morality, truth, justice, patriotism … and American citizenship.”

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Max Rafferty, a conservative Episcopalian, assigned aide Edwin Klotz to interpret the code. Next, the board asked member Donn Moomaw, evangelical pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church near Beverly Hills, to prepare an abbreviated set of guidelines based on Klotz’s eighty-one-page report.

The final product was a nine-page middle-of-the-road document urging student understanding of America’s pluralistic heritage, the need for law and order, the importance of constitutional rights, and the virtues of truth and personal integrity.

Not everyone agreed. Some rightwing groups and conservative churchgoers wanted more of the fundamentalist-styled Klotz report and less of moderation. As a compromise gesture, the board voted six to four to include the Klotz paper in the bibliography of the guidelines.²The Klotz report criticized the nation’s Supreme Court, mental-health programs, sex education, and the United Nations.

Moomaw observed that he found himself “ashamed” in “a strange arena”: an evangelical in a key public role, yet under bitter attack by theological kinfolk. (One woman vociferously booed at close range a nun who represented Catholic educators, then handed her a New Testament. “Thank you,” said another woman, shaking Moomaw’s hand, “for ruining our schools.”)

Another committee will now decide how to implement the guidelines; conservatives and liberals alike vowed to be a watchdog over it.

The earlier decision by the board to include creationism in science guidelines provoked a hassle among liberals. The amendment merely said that “the origin of life implies at least a dualism or the necessity to use several theories to fully explain” it, that “while the Bible and other philosophic treatises also mention creation, science has independently postulated the various theories of creation. Therefore, creation in scientific terms is not a religious or philosophic belief.” Further, “some of the scientific data (e.g., the regular absence of transitional forms) may be best explained by a creation theory while other data (e.g., transmutation of species) substantiate a process of evolution.”

Inaccurate news accounts then mistakenly reported that the board had mandated the Genesis account of creation for inclusion in the state’s science curriculum. Basing its action on this misinformation, the San Francisco Presbytery of the United Presbyterian Church (along with other groups) passed a resolution condemning the amendment and asking that the Genesis account be declared off-limits on campus.

EDWARD PLOWMAN

Holiness In Cincinnati

Meeting in Cincinnati for the first national gathering of the Wesleyan Church, some 700 ministers and laymen entered the seventies on their knees at a watch-night service. But speakers throughout the three-day conference (December 30-January 1) made it clear that committed Christians should get off their knees and on their feet to evangelize the unsaved.

General Superintendent Melvin Snyder (one of four) opened the special conference on evangelism by urging the Wesleyans to unite in finding new methods of telling the old story of Good News. The Reverend Clyde Dupin, former Indianapolis pastor now on the staff of former pro football player Bill Glass’s Citywide Crusades, said the most effective way for a pastor to get his members involved in soul-winning is to lead them on weekly visitation calls. Other speakers included Dr. Paul S. Rees of World Vision and Dr. Clyde Taylor of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Most of the twelve seminars turned into evangelistic sermons with lusty “amens” and groanings in the spirit from enraptured listeners.

The Wesleyan Methodists withdrew from the Methodist Church in 1843 in opposition to slavery. Wesleyans then continued to keep their distance because of doctrinal differences.

When the Wesleyan Methodists merged with the doctrinally similar Pilgrim Holiness Church to form the Wesleyan Church in June, 1968, they adopted a position paper stating, “Evangelism is the answer.” They reaffirmed that view in Cincinnati: Dr. J. B. Abbott, general superintendent, urged the conference to “face hard questions, look for honest answers, and be willing to rethink, restructure and adjust as necessary.”

JAMES ADAMS

Religion In Transit

Five hundred churchmen from six New England states were challenged to a spiritual awakening this month by the Reverend Donald Gill, head of the Evangelistic Association of New England. The Boston meeting was patterned after the U. S. Congress on Evangelism held in Minneapolis last September. Gill said congresses will be held on the state level next.

As civic tension mounted in Mississippi, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders announced formation of a forum designed to make the public school system “a model for the rest of the nation.” Bishop Joseph Brunini wrote the state’s Catholics that the parochial schools would not offer “a refuge from integration,” and charged that “hasty schemes” to create a new private school system “do nothing but defraud the youth.…”

The National Council of Churches’ ailing twice-monthly magazine Tempo, which costs about $100,000 annually to produce, has a new lease on life. Editor Fletcher Coates said a December drive to increase paid circulation boosted it from 3,500 to 6,500, and that the one-year-old publication will continue at least Temporarily.

New York State’s divorce rate, for years the lowest in the nation, has more than tripled in the first two years of a liberalized matrimonial law, according to the New York Times.

Forty-two per cent of U. S. adults attended church in a typical week in 1969, 7 per cent less than in 1958, the Gallup Poll reported. A high of 49 per cent came in 1955 and 1958.

The lead editorial of Lutheran Forum, an independent monthly, last month urged American Lutherans to meet James Forman’s demand for $50 million in reparations as a response to “this modern call for repentance of the sins of racism.”

Almost 1,300 young people from “Plymouth Brethren (Open)” congregations gathered at Wheaton College last month for a World Missions Congress. Black evangelist Tom Skinner, a Brethren “commended worker,” was one of twenty featured speakers.

NBC-TV will present the first nationwide religious folk musical telecast February 1. The Southern Baptist hour-long color special, “Tell It Like It Is,” will be the first of four prime-time telecasts allotted by NBC to faith groups this year.

Personalia

Self-styled radical minister James D. Watson of Queens was unanimously elected moderator of the United Presbyterian New York Presbytery. Watson, who may clash with the Spanish-speaking Presbyterian ministers in the city, said he will press for “the kinds of things the Young Lords are doing” (see page 31). Calling himself a “Christian humanist,” Watson said he believes in “social action and not … preaching or the rest of that nonsense we went through years ago.”

The Navy’s highest-ranking chaplain, Rear Admiral James W. Kelly, told a press luncheon that antiwar moratorium activities in the nation haven’t hurt the morale of U. S. troops in Viet Nam but have encouraged enemy rocket and terrorist attacks … Meanwhile, Leon A. Dickinson, Jr., secretary for chaplains of the United Church of Christ, demanded that military chaplains be instructed to uphold officers and enlisted men who refuse to carry out orders they deem “immoral, in violation of the laws of war, or a crime against humanity.”

Dr. Robert T. Taylor, senior general secretary of the American Bible Society, retired after twenty-nine years with the organization … Renowned preacher-teacher Dr. George A. Buttrick retired from Garrett Seminary last month to live in Nashville.

Dr. O. Dale Emery of Marion, Indiana, became the executive director of the National Holiness Association this month. He was director of youth for the Wesleyan Church.

Remember the man who was discharged from the Royal Canadian Navy in 1951 and deported to the United States for impersonating a surgeon? Ferdinand Waldo DeMara, now 47, was famous as the Great Impostor for also posing as a college psychology professor, prison warden, schoolteacher, Trappist monk, and zoologist. And now? Known as the Reverend Fred W. DeMara, he is the new pastor of the thirty-member Conservative Baptist church in the Washington island hamlet of Friday Harbor. DeMara says he accepted Christ as his personal Savior in 1958.

Agnes Hamstra, 18, a supply aide at a Toronto hospital, was fired Christmas Eve for refusing on religious grounds to pay union dues. She is one of a number of Ontario Christian Reformed Church members sacked because they won’t pay. They believe the unions are materialistic and atheistic.

Deaths

ELMER J. F. ARNDT, 66, professor at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, chairman of the Theological Commission of the United Church of Christ; in St. Louis.

GLADYS AYLWARD, 68, independent missionary in China whose rescue of nearly one hundred Chinese children from the Japanese in 1938 was included in a film based on her life, Inn of the Sixth Happiness; in Taiwan.

B. D. ZONDERVAN, JR., 34, vice-president of the Zondervan Publishing House founded by his father and uncle, active in many evangelical organizations; in Grand Rapids, of cancer.

World Scene

All but one of eleven United Methodist missionaries—including five Americans—in Algiers, Algeria, were expelled at the end of 1969. An Algerian press release reportedly charged the missionaries with anti-national activities.

The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches of Scotland last month agreed to honor each other’s baptism rites and to draw up a common rite and text for the sacrament.

The East Asian Christian Conference, the Asian wing of the World Council of Churches, set aside $520,576 to help Viet Nam and Laos this year. Most of the money will go to relief work sponsored by Asian Christian Service.

Bernadette Devlin, whiz kid of Westminster, is appealing a six month sentence for her part in last summer’s Londonderry riots.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Michael Ramsey, has deprecated the reported papal intention to canonize forty English Roman Catholics martyred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

After living off its vast wealth for centuries, the Roman Catholic Church in Chile has decided to liquidate most assets and depend on the voluntary contributions of its members.

Pressure within the Roman Catholic Church for social reform in Brazil has brought it into conflict with the country’s conservative, military-dominated government. More than 200 bishops have become increasingly estranged from the government, according to the New York Times, and charges of murder and torture of dozens of persons opposing the government have been presented to Pope Paul.

Looking beyond the end of hostilities, a report prepared for the World Council of Churches says that between 100,000 and 300,000 Vietnamese women are living as prostitutes, bar girls and “temporary wives” of American GIs. “It will be difficult for the girls to return to farm life” in postwar South Viet Nam, the report added.

More than 300 students attended a two-week inter-seminary study tour to Israel this month, representing ten Midwest schools.

During the 1960s, world membership figures in the Mormon Church jumped 74 per cent, from 1,816,000 to an estimated 2,815,000.

Local councils of churches in many major cities are sick and dying. For example:

Both the Berkeley Area Council and the Oakland Council in northern California have voted themselves out of business. The Oklahoma City Council has been phased out. Councils in Kansas City, Missouri, Nashville, Tulsa, and Columbus have been replaced. And while executives ponder its future, the pulse of the St. Petersburg, Florida, council grows feebler.

The old council of churches of the Pittsburgh area (comprising 600 Protestant congregations with 400,000 members) recently vanished like magic.

But although area councils seem to be faltering, many state councils appear to be alive and well,¹Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Texas already have joint Protestant-Catholic councils of churches, and eight other states are contemplating combined councils. and the emergence of more informal “coalitions for metropolitan mission” may be a trend for getting things done in the seventies.

After the fade-out of the Pittsburgh council, to cite one case, the way was cleared for the creation of Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania, an agency with full Catholic and Orthodox participation. Unlike the old agency, Christian Associates puts major stress on social problems—housing, poverty, youth, the aged, and race.

An expert in church councils sees the job of the new task-force-coalition approach as “raising the right issues and helping churches do something about them.” Observes the Reverend David J. Bowman, S. J., the first Catholic priest to become a full-time staff member of the National Council of Churches: “Local initiative is being taken,” but not necessarily through a formal structure of churches.

Bowman, a personal deputy of NCC general secretary Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, has been devoting much of his time to facilitating Catholic membership in local and in state councils of churches.

Why are local councils in trouble? Two chief reasons are lack of funds, part of a syndrome affecting most of the American church scene, and a poor image.

After the Berkeley and Oakland councils folded, the Reverend Raymond Jennings, pastor of Berkeley’s First Baptist Church, noted that the demise of local councils is a national problem.

“Councils of churches have tried to follow the middle of the road,” he said. They have tried to give the image they are socially oriented, and it hasn’t worked. The conservatives are disenchanted with the councils’ social-action stand, and the social-action groups are turned off because they’re tired of getting nothing but resolutions and no real action.”

Jennings added that “this business of not making a commitment in either direction has resulted in both segments seeking other alignments.”

Another reason for the decline of area councils, according to Bowman, is the development of more inclusive neighborhood parish councils that include Catholics and Jews. He said Catholic parishes are now members of at least forty city and local church councils, a development since Vatican II.

Financial problems were cited as the chief factor for the firing of the executive director of the St. Petersburg council, and more conservative churches have backed off on support since the council’s involvement in school and youth problems and the garbage strike last year.

The city government developed adverse feelings toward the St. Petersburg council for its attempts to act as a “conscience” for the government, a board member said.

Bowman and others see the emerging pattern as implementing on the regional level what Espy proposed at the stormy December triennial of the NCC in Detroit (see December 19 issue, page 30). That plan calls for an inclusive general ecumenical council, a national umbrella organization with near-autonomous program units to bring like-minded people together for specific tasks. Most, presumably, would center on social issues.

Plans for an interdenominational social-service agency that would provide an option for meeting community needs without involving Baptist, Roman Catholic, and other churches in a council of churches are in the works in Oklahoma City. Catholic Bishop Victor Reed and former Southern Baptist Convention president Herschel H. Hobbs have been on the steering committee.

The object, as that of Christian Associates in Pennsylvania, is to tool up for social action on the community level, enabling churches not wanting to affiliate with a council of churches to have a piece of the action.

Hobbs said the Agency for Christian Cooperative Ministry is organized on a “project method” and will include some evangelism efforts. Twenty-five denominations are involved. Billy Graham is to speak at a kick-off rally February 3.

Christian Associates director W. Lee Hicks, an American Baptist minister, gives a glowing account of the nine-county coalition in southwest Pennsylvania that includes 2,200 congregations: “We no longer are at the stage where we’re suspicious of one another.… I think the feeling was that we [Catholics and Protestants] were working together now in so many different areas unofficially, it was time to think about the possibility of developing a formal working relationship.”

Straws suggesting the new shift in cooperative church action are also in the wind in Seattle, Houston, Columbus, and Kansas City. Metropolitan inter-church associations have sprung up in place of the old councils in Columbus and Kansas City, and a new constitution for the Greater Seattle Council would provide a strong role for bishops and other denominational executives in a new structure open to para-church groups and specialized ministries.

In Houston, the style is getting things done through coalitions, or “being ecumenical without really trying to do more than solve a simple problem.”

“We have discovered that there is little purpose in attempting to get broad ecumenical consensus for general goals,” writes Richard Siciliano in last December’s issue of Church in Mission, a Southern Presbyterian Board of National Ministries publication.

“Nor is it possible now to create any ecumenical joint-action-for-mission vehicle which has room on board for everyone, and can take everybody everywhere to do everything—but which will not move until everybody says, ‘let’s go.’ ”

The NCC’s Bowman thinks the word “council” may not be in the future of these groups; “conferences” (more acceptable to Catholics) may become more common.

Whatever the diversity of names and structures that may attach themselves to these burgeoning alliances, fund-raising will continue to be a problem.

And it seems clear that the ecumenical imperative won’t allow most participants the luxury of discussing what they believe before jumping into action.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Evangelism In Africa: Not In A Vacuum

East African Christian-education leaders are revising courses and programs to make them more compatible with crucial questions posed by their change-wracked continent. In most government schools and colleges, religion has been retained and even fostered as an official course.

A new syllabus of religious instruction has been published in Kenya, for example. It instructs schools to assume partial responsibility to prepare pupils through religious education for their place in the family and the new national community.

“Christian religious education,” the syllabus notes in its introduction, “teaches the relationship of the pupil to God and his fellow-men through Jesus Christ. Salvation in Christ is seen as the fulfillment of the nature of man.”

A recent annual meeting of the Christian Churches’ Educational Association of East Africa also stressed the churches’ responsibility for imparting the Christian faith in schools.

“Christian education in Africa has come to people who in their traditional ways are notoriously religious,” said Dr. John Mbiti, the poet who heads the religious-studies department at Makerere University (Uganda), in a keynote address. “The dissemination of Christian education is, therefore, taking place, not in a vacuum, but in an intensely religious environment which colors much of how the people understand the Christian message.

Mbiti noted that Christianity has yet to penetrate deeply into African soil: “Many individuals have been converted in the heart only, but their mind, emotions, and the social-cultural context in which they live, have hardly been touched by the Christian message.”

Therefore, he added, Christian educators should present biblical truth as the fulfillment for which Africa’s religiosity has groped. They should assimilate and incorporate Africans’ traditional religious perception and sensitivity into their teaching, Mbiti feels.

Although Mbiti’s paper has received wide support in East Africa, many evangelicals are studying it cautiously. Some basic features of all African religions are clearly irreconcilable with Christianity: a world view that all is divine, ancestor worship, the notion that spirits of the dead are “personalities” who exert tremendous influence on the living, a super-abundance of ritualism, and the belief that events can be controlled through magic.

Another point in Mbiti’s paper that evangelical Christians may reject is the implication that Africa’s traditional religiosity ought to be uncritically regarded as a pre-evangelistic condition. Fully recognizing the need to communicate the Gospel in Africa’s peculiar cultural context, native evangelicals will most likely insist on retaining the uniqueness of the Christ-revelation in human history.

ODHIAMBO OKITE

Clergy Protest, But Pageant Comes Up Roses

The New Year’s Day Tournament of Roses Parade delivered its annual floral goodwill message to the world in Pasadena, California, despite the protests of about thirty local clergymen. The ministers, led by United Church of Christ campus chaplain Albert G. Cohen, said the time and money involved in the pageant “might be better spent feeding and housing the poor and needy.”

The clerics demanded, among other things, that participants in the parade match their expenditures with funds for the poor, volunteer laborers donate equal time to urban problems, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference mule team be included in the parade, and the theme for 1971 be “Good Neighbors Come in All Colors.”

Tournament of Roses manager Max Colwell sympathized with the protest but affirmed that the parade “for eighty years has delivered … joy, peace, happiness and beauty to 98 million people.”

The eighty-first parade continued the long tradition of Christian witness; floats included the Salvation Army’s “Christmas Is Forever” and the Lutheran Laymen’s League entry, “He Lives.” The latter offered a beautiful floral proclamation of the central fact of the Gospel; three empty crosses represented the resurrection of Christ.

Poland’S Protestants

In Poland today there are 800,000 Protestants and thirty religious organizations to serve them. The largest is the Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession. The bishop of this church, Dr. Andrzej Wantula, who is also a vice-president of the Lutheran World Federation, says Poland “guarantees under constitutional law complete freedom for all beliefs and the government helps to build new churches.”

The Evangelical Church has 100,000 members in six dioceses, two seminaries, and 150 churches with 200 pastors. Eleven thousand children take instruction at 120 Sunday schools.

The Reformed Church has 5,000 members organized into ten parishes. It, like the Evangelical Church, belongs to the World Council of Churches, and it is a member of the International Alliance of Reformed Churches.

The United Evangelical Church was organized in 1947 and has 7,000 members with 150 pastors. The Methodist Church, which was recognized after World War II by socialist Poland, has 4,700 members in fifty-three parishes with forty pastors. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, also recognized after the war, has 6,000 members and sixty-five clergy.

All the Protestant churches belong to the Polish Ecumenical Council, which publishes a special bulletin in Polish, German, and English. Also part of the religious scene are a very active Greek Orthodox Church and the Polish National Catholic Church, whose mother church is in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Polish government finances higher education for Protestant clergy, conducted at the Academy of Christian Theology in Warsaw.

Recently a Communist daily newspaper in Warsaw seconded a call by Poland’s Roman Catholic bishops for an ecclesiastical stabilization of the country’s western and northern territories through appointments of permanent bishops by Pope Paul VI. The editorial said the move would make the country’s church administration coincide with its frontiers.

Appointment of permanent Polish bishops is strongly opposed by West Germany, which maintains that these territories are still German until their status is clarified by an international agreement.

ANTONI GRONOWICZ

The Attraction Of Adventism

On a rainy Sunday evening forty years ago this month, a young evangelist stood before a small congregation in southern California. “I believe God wants me to go on radio to preach the Gospel,” he said. “I want you to prove I know what God wants. At the close of this meeting, I’ll be standing at the door. If you believe God wants me on radio, drop an offering into the left pocket of my coat when you leave.”

Into the pocket that night, during the first year of the depression, went wrist watches, rings, gold teeth—and money. They bought thirteen half-hour programs on a Long Beach station and launched a memorable ministry for Seventh-day Adventists. The ministry has expanded; today there are 1,791 weekly broadcasts on 1,424 stations in forty-five languages around the world. Although the programs have a very ordinary format, they attract an average of 11,000 letters each week.

The pleasant-pitched voice of the “Voice of Prophecy,” as it is known in English, is that of H. M. S. Richards, whose name suggests a British ship more than the world’s best-known Adventist. He probably has made more converts and friends for the Adventist cause than any other person, and at 76 he is still going strong. Richards’s low-key approach is typical of Adventist diligence and efficiency. It keeps paying off. When he started broadcasting in 1930 there were 300,000 Adventists around the world. Latest statistics show the total approaching two million (including 400,000 in the United States), and anyone familiar with Adventist discipline knows that these are hard, minimal figures exclusive of mere adherents and hangers-on.

Adventists also influence outsiders favorably through their extensive medical work and emphasis on health. Their most popular current service is five-day stop-smoking clinics. Latest figures show two million participants a year. Their vegetarian campaign is less effective, but Adventist food companies are prospering reasonably well with a wide variety of meatless dishes such as Wham, a substitute for ham. Adventists also frown upon tea, coffee, and alcoholic beverages.

On the ecclesiastical front, the Adventists are also being heard, but seldom do they get pushy. They send observers to many key religious meetings and are conscientious cooperators in a number of religious professional groups.²Adventist educators occasionally exhibit a surprising measure of openness, too, as when they brought Paul Tillich and Joseph Fletcher to one of their campuses for lectures.

Regular conversational meetings with the World Council of Churches have resulted in the appointment of an Adventist to the WCC’s Faith and Order Commission, though the denomination itself is not a formal member. Since 1968, Adventists have also been actively represented at the annual meeting of the secretaries of the world confessional families. Adventist spokesmen insist, however, that there is no thought of joining any part of the conciliar movement.

As for relations with orthodox evangelicals, there is no sign of a thaw. Adventists make it clear they would be happy to cooperate, but in most evangelical circles they are still regarded as an unwelcome sect. Many anti-Adventist evangelicals think their legalistic requirements add up to a works salvation. Adventists contend that doctrines drawn up by founder Ellen White more than one hundred years ago share the evangelical view of Christ’s atonement. Adventist eschatology, which includes some views distinctive to their own movement, also has been a roadblock to rapprochement.

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Nude Power

Two irked youth delegates at a Methodist conference in Kansas City this month decided the only thing that would speed up a vote on establishing a black youth task force would be the threat of nudity.

As forty young people (half of them girls) and thirty-three bishops watched, Thomas Hyde and James Conn began disrobing—an item of clothing at a time—for each additional person who spoke on the issue. Conn was wearing a shirt, pants, and undershorts.

After two more people spoke, according to a story in the National Catholic Reporter, somebody shouted, “Let’s vote!” They did. The black task force was approved—barely.

Mission 70: Change Now

Four thousand five hundred Southern Baptist young people met in Atlanta between Christmas and New Year’s and agreed on one thing: They demand change in their traditionally conservative Convention and they want it now.

The occasion was Mission 70, a modern, upbeat attempt to interest youth in church occupations. It featured dialogue, drama, choreography, and McLuhan-like multi-media presentations. A few National Baptist black young people attended also.

NBC national-affairs correspondent John Chancellor told the opening-night audience that the “dominating problem of the seventies and the rest of the century will be population, resources, and environment.” He warned that our present plans will consume all of the free world’s resources by the year 2000. “We have thirty-five to one hundred years to get the system back into order or the world will end, not with a bang but with a gasp for air.… The young will be trying to clean up the skies, rivers, and lakes. They will have allies they don’t have now.… New values will be needed when the world is governed not by more for everyone but enough for everyone.”

Chancellor claimed the “myths made up to process immigrants into American society” are now anachronistic and must be replaced. “There is a spectacular opportunity for ministry in the seventies,” he said. “Faith may have a chance to make a comeback … and that is where all of you come in.”

The large majority of young members of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination took his call to revolutionize values seriously. Said one: “I’d like to see us get into the twentieth century before it’s over.”

Dissatisfaction with Southern Baptist inaction on pollution, Viet Nam, and poverty was expressed with increasing vociferousness. But the loudest, most disgusted voices (there were many) castigated the widespread Southern Baptist practice of racial discrimination. Tales of pews refused to blacks were told and retold. Nine Michigan blacks attending Mission 70 were refused housing by an Atlanta church. Hundreds of conferees put their words into action by sweeping over Atlanta ghettos with brooms and garbage pails, receiving nationwide publicity and some local resentment for their efforts.

Everyone wanted change, but most decided to remain Southern Baptists. They consoled themselves with the belief that the establishment is “going to die soon.” Then “we can be the ones who will change the church.” A few decided, bitterly, to leave the “heathen field of the church.”

Almost unanimously the conferees adopted a revolutionary (by Southern Baptist standards) position statement, “Here We Stand.” It committed them to “minister not only to the spiritual but also to the physical needs of man, be involved in a worldwide quest for universal peace, deal with the problems of over-population, pollution, and technology, work towards the brotherhood of all men, and respond to poverty and all other forms of human suffering in the world today.”

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.

Deans List Top Ten

Name the top ten Christian liberal-arts colleges, quizzed Biola College’s dean of students. Six participants in Craig E. Seaton’s survey of deans of students at Christian colleges either claimed such a listing was impossible or declined to make such judgments.

Seventeen of the eighteen who answered the question listed their own institutions of higher learning. And all eighteen selected Wheaton College. The results:

1. Wheaton College

2. Westmont College

3. Taylor University

4. Seattle Pacific College

5. Gordon College

6. Houghton College

7. Earlham College

8. Bethel College, St. Paul

9. Bob Jones University

10. Biola College, Olivet Nazarene, and the University of Redlands

Why those colleges? The reason most often given was their “long established reputation for all-around excellence.”

The Biafran secession arose out of Nigeria’s most serious problem: distrust between the country’s major ethnic groups. Late in 1965 this distrust brought the processes of government in Africa’s most populous state almost to a standstill. By May 30, 1967, breakaway Biafra had announced its independence.

Early this month, as rivers of refugees clogged the roadways with nothing to do but to die, the lingering war came to a halt as Biafra capitulated and its leader, General C. Odumegwu Ojukwu, fled the country. But the collapse of the starving secessionist state by no means marked the end of the conflict—or the distrust.

Three days after thousands of Biafran soldiers surrendered, Nigeria’s leader, General Yakubu Gowon, assailed the international relief agencies coordinated through Joint Church Aid (JCA) and said: “Let them keep their blood money. We don’t want their help or assistance.” The day before, amid a hail of machine-gun fire, the last JCA plane roared away from the rough airstrip at Uga, thirty miles east of the captured main Biafran airport, with forty-five refugees aboard. An attempted flight to return with food was aborted.

Meanwhile, an estimated 24,000 tons of supplies were stockpiled in Nigeria—some of the food probably spoiling. Dr. Clyde W. Taylor of the National Association of Evangelicals declared: “This could be genocide, if the Nigerians don’t do anything with it.” The NAE World Relief Committee has cooperated with Caritas, the Catholic relief agency; the American Jewish Committee; and the Protestant Church World Service—which has spent over $1 million a month since August of 1968—in aid to Biafra.

Taylor and Nancy Nicalo, a director of Church World Service’s Africa department, told CHRISTIANITY TODAY they were hopeful airlift operations could resume soon.

“All relief efforts are stymied on the nearby Portugese island of São Tomé,” Miss Nicalo said at mid-month. But she added that the Nigerian Christian Council had asked for financial aid.

Church leaders stated Nigeria was cold toward the JCA because “we have given too much help to the wrong side,” i. e., Biafra. Britain, which was able to fly in ten tons of supplies to Biafra January 13, was seen as having the best chance to aid the starving millions because the British “officially” helped Nigeria.

Beyond the obvious problem of logistics, said Miss Nicalo, there is the extreme problem of gaining the confidence of the Biafrans, many of whom fled to the forest to avoid capture by the advancing Nigerian army. “I don’t think they are going to come out of the bush,” said Miss Nicalo. “The anguish doesn’t end.… Trust is a difficult thing to build up.”

The Ibos, the dominant tribe in Biafra, are Christians, having embraced the faith when missionaries penetrated the swamps of the Niger delta near the turn of the century. About half of the estimated six to seven million still alive are Catholic; the rest are mainly of Protestant denominations. The Ibos, existing in a largely Muslim and animistic culture, are educated, individualistic, clannish—and sometimes considered arrogant.

By mid-month, church sources said two nuns were the only American church workers remaining in Biafra. An Irish nun, who left just before the surrender, observed: “There’s so much hatred you can’t expect it to stop, no matter what the leaders say.” But she said she planned to return.

A Biafran studying for his doctorate in philosophy at an American university told a reporter on the eve of the military collapse that he felt Biafrans would secretly welcome even defeat as a means to end the war. “But we’ve lost a generation,” he added sadly, “for the young children are so bad off from hunger that they can’t make any contribution.”

Would he go back now? “Yes, of course,” he replied, “even if it’s to die. It’s my country.”

Catholic Concerns: Celibacy, Due Process

The possibility of an open rift between Pope Paul and Dutch Catholics widened this month when an assembly of the Netherlands Catholic Church voted overwhelmingly in favor of lifting the ban on married priests and admitting women to the priesthood.

The Dutch national pastoral council—the only such council in the world—has no power to make changes in church policy. This can only be done by bishops, and all eight who attended the four-day gathering abstained on the controversial resolutions. But some observers see the move as driving deeper a wedge that could result in a split from Rome by the Netherlands church. A Vatican official, however, characterized the matter as “just an inquiry by the Dutch priests on the celibacy issue.”

The motion that “the obligation of celibacy as a condition of the priesthood should be abrogated” was adopted 93 to 2, with 11 abstentions, including the bishops. The motion that women be admitted to priesthood was approved 72 to 8, with 24 abstentions.

Many speakers argued that not much time was left: 400 of the 12,000 Dutch priests are said to have left the ministry in the past two years.

Meanwhile, “grievance” procedures for Michigan’s 2.3 million Roman Catholics became a reality last month, and a few days later, a Catholic bishop in San Francisco submitted for review by a committee of priests a decision regarding a priest’s assignment. Both events were precedent-making in the United States, and possibly the world.

The arbitration-mediation procedure for settling administrative disputes in the church approved in Michigan is popularly known as “due process.” The National Conference of Catholic Bishops last fall unanimously approved a report urging that each bishop make such measures available.

The Michigan plan, spearheaded by John Cardinal Dearden of Detroit (he was threatened by a priests’ strike if due process wasn’t established by January 1), provides for a five-member conciliation panel in each diocese. Laymen, priests, and members of religious orders compose the panel, in line with Vatican II’s recommendation that laymen take an increasing role in the church.

If the conciliation panel fails, the next step is a statewide provincial arbitration board, and ultimately, each diocese will have an administrative tribunal that can make binding rulings.

The Michigan bishops took the unprecedented step of agreeing to the plan, even if one of them is involved in a case. San Francisco archbishop Joseph T. McGucken agreed, in a similar step, that he would abide by a committee recommendation, as did complaining priest Eugene Boyle.

McGucken removed Boyle, a controversial activist, from a teaching position at St. Patrick’s College last September, while retaining his other assignments. The fourteen-member committee of priests published a report that appeared to strike a middle ground that will allow Boyle to continue some teaching.

But in Washington, D. C., attorneys for twenty-one theologians at Catholic University who dissented from Pope Paul’s birth-control encyclical blasted some members of the Catholic hierarchy and the school’s trustees for making a mockery of due process.

In a 217-page book to be published soon, reported Washington Star religion editor William Willoughby, the attorneys charge that an inquiry into the conduct of the theologians “paid merely verbal respect for the principles of academic responsibility.… There is little academic freedom where the price of its exercise is a year spent under an unjustified professional cloud.”

According to the New York Times, the Archdiocese of Baltimore is also implementing a due-process procedure similar to the one in Michigan, and dioceses in Denver, New Orleans, and other cities are expected to follow suit shortly.

Irish Stew Sans Spuds

Thirty U. S. Catholic bishops attended a workshop at mid-month designed to familiarize them with communications theory and know-how in an age of increasingly sophisticated religious journalism and evident controversy within Catholicism.

Top media pros speaking at the six-day lab and lecture session in New Orleans were NBC-TV president Don Durgin, Westinghouse Broadcasting president Donald McGannon, television star Mike Douglas, and Frank Shakespeare of the U. S. Information Agency. Other lecturers included William R. MacKaye, religion editor of the Washington Post, and National Catholic News Service director Richard Guilderson.

To the consternation of diocesan editors, however, not one working editor from the American Catholic press was asked to address the prelates.

Pouted Ed Wall of Baltimore’s Catholic Review: “A major communications workshop for the hierarchy without … successful working editors from the diocesan press is giving the bishops Irish stew without any potatoes.”

“James Forman’s basic concept is that the churches have been a helping hand and a willing partner in the oppression of black people. This also holds true for Puerto Rican people, especially the Catholic Church, since most Puerto Ricans are Catholic.”

This was Pablo (Yoruba) Guzman talking. Speaking for a militant, revolutionary Puerto Rican group called the Young Lords, Yoruba said, “What we do, we do out of love.” The Lords in New York City, and a Mexican-American coalition in Los Angeles, have been leading a new round of assaults on churches. Takeovers and destruction of church property seem to be the next rung of escalation in the confrontation tactics developed last spring by Black Manifesto-maker James Forman and his supporters.

The target of the Lords’ attack was, curiously, a Methodist church. The First Spanish Church was chosen, Yoruba said, “because it was right smack dead in the center of the barrio” (Spanishspeaking community). And, he added, it’s the one church in the community that has shied away from social action: “It’s only open for a few hours and for the rest of the week it turns into one big brick that sits on 111th Street and Lexington.”

The Lords seized the church late last month and turned it into a “liberation school” for ghetto children. They served free breakfasts—and Marxism. “All power to the people,” shouted seventy-five youngsters as they swilled orange juice with their cookies.

The congregation and pastor refused space for the program, later filed suit to oust the Lords after they had spiked a railroad tie across the front door. The eleven-day occupation ended when eight unarmed sheriff’s deputies arrested 111 Young Lords and peacefully removed them from the premises.

Simultaneously, more than fifty white supporters of the Lords left the New York offices of United Methodist Bishop Lloyd C. Wicke. The demonstrators, including many seminarians, took over the Methodist Board of Missions suite for forty-eight hours, saying they would stay until the Lords were permitted space in the Spanish Harlem church.

Wicke, refusing to agree with the demand, said that the Lords were not a part of the regular congregation and that he had to protect the congregation’s “right to worship as they see fit.” At one point, a bearded youth pushed the bishop roughly against a wall. The mission-office occupiers promised an escalation in “pressure on the Methodist hierarchy” if Young Lords were arrested. Some Methodist mission-board personnel helped the occupiers.

The Young Lords organization is part of the Rainbow Coalition, which includes the Black Panthers and the Patriot Party, a revolutionary group of poor whites. Yoruba thinks Christ “was a pretty violent cat when he had to be,” and views the Lords’ cause as “a Holy War … with righteous feeling … and that’s why we’ve got Christ right up there next to Mao—he was a heavy cat.”

A Young Lords position paper calls for self-determination for Puerto Ricans—independence on the island and inside the United States. It says: “We oppose the American military … fight anti-Communism … believe armed self-defense and armed struggle are the only way to liberation¹“We are opposed to violence—the violence of hungry children, illiterate adults, diseased old people, the violence of poverty and profit. We have asked, petitioned, gone to courts, demonstrated peacefully, and voted for politicians full of empty promises. But we still ain’t free. The time has come to defend the lives of our people against pig brutality, for revolutionary war against the businessman, politician, and police. When a government oppresses the people, they have the right to abolish it and create a new one.”; … in short we want a socialist society.”

Meanwhile, out in the City of the Angels, a Chicano-Catholic conflict looms as Mexican-Americans seek social action and James Francis Cardinal McIntyre stresses “service to people.” St. Basil’s, an architecturally striking Catholic church on Wilshire Boulevard, is the focal point for protests by militant groups.

The Reverend Blase Bonpane, an ousted Maryknoll missionary, conducted an impromptu mass on the steps before a Christmas Eve melee in which 200 persons stormed the church. Five policemen were injured and seven demonstrators arrested in the midnight debacle, repeated the next morning by a smaller number. Glass was broken in the entrance doors and foyer showcases.

A spokesman for Catholics Por La Raza said St. Basil’s was chosen because it has $4 million budgeted to construct a hospital. “The Chicanos feel they have been short-changed by the institutional church, that it must proclaim something of the message of Jesus, which had to do with poverty and not … million-dollar structures,” said Bonpane.

In another militant maneuver, Black Economic Development Conference leader Muhammad Kenyatta showed displeasure with the response of the Presbytery of Philadelphia to $250,000 “reparations” demands by the BEDC. Interrupting a service in the Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, Presbyterian Church, Kenyatta dumped communion bread and wine on the floor, saying: “This is the blood and body of my people.”

How many churches do you know that are suffering from senility? If you have moved about and have had your eyes open, you have probably seen at least one church whose energy was sapped by members who were unwilling to learn new ways and to support good ways. Thus its grip on both the present and the future was seriously weakened.

Many churches seem to ignore the fact that they are living organisms. They grow up and age. Vitality and virility may characterize them, or senility and sluggishness. If we who are a part of a church want it to stay alert and healthy and strong, we must work for continual renewal. One step might be to have an annual check-up, to see whether we are getting stiff and weak and slowed down by a hardening of the spiritual arteries.

Historically, the free churches have been the first in religious and educational and social inventing and innovating. Some of the consequences of this are the church school, free public education, and the first American colleges and universities. But does previous strength and vitality guarantee present good health? Of course not. Nor does a good heritage insure a productive future. Our churches cannot afford to lounge comfortably. We must come to grips with the processes by which we function, and the leadership that is necessary, and the faith that supports our very existence.

Are we ready for change and renewal and continuous responsiveness? Can we get at our problems? Do we care about our vitality? Will we use and develop our resources? Verbal assent to the values that undergird our enterprise as the Church of Jesus Christ is good, but can we make these values live? Each local church must answer such questions.

What characteristics are likely to be found in a church that is ready for renewal? First, it should have strong and varied leadership, the privilege of free choice, and initiative on the part of its members. It should be committed to govern itself and yet be cooperative. It cannot afford to depend on the denomination for motivation and initiative.

The majority of the organizations in our land seem to be driving in the opposite direction. This is the age of conglomerates, and many organizations are speeding toward merger. Socialism is almost a holy word to some. Evidently some of the churches thought they were being left out. Since large-scale organization seems to be answering the threat to survival as well as fulfilling the quest for power, why not do it in religion? So we see and hear of the acceleration of church mergers. Some of this must undoubtedly be for the good. But is eliminating autonomy and increasing power systems going to lubricate stiff joints and loosen rigid minds? Is larger bureaucracy the correct prescription? The road to church union is something like an Interstate Highway. It is wide and smooth and well marked. But that does not mean it will take us in the proper direction.

One of the aspects of the United States that helped make it great is pluralism. People of vastly different political, social, economic and religious persuasions have been welcome to live in the same country, the same state, and the same city, attend the same schools, shop the same stores. Variety. A multiplicity of alternatives. These are good.

We should think twice and again before we follow what appear to be the signs of the times to more centralized, more comprehensive control. I do not say that we should reject all moves in that direction—only that we should be very careful. Where do the large denominational budgets and programs get their fuel to operate? From the individuals in local churches who give their talent and time and treasure. In a larger system with more centralized control, we would gain efficiency and lose individuality (or autonomy).

Both the New Testament and the Old Testament teach the importance of the individual. Stories are recorded showing that one person can throw a whole situation out of kilter. The New Testament teaches that one person, no matter his status in life, is just as important as any other person. One church is just as important as any other church.

What about leadership? Capability for renewal and growth means that our lay leadership must be strong and varied. We cannot decry as lowly the vital opportunity of inculcating religious and moral values to our children in church school. We cannot assume that this educational venture will succeed without our commitment. Nor can we assume that moral and ethical instruction of our adults is not necessary. Lifelong education will help us stay out of embarrassing ruts—or at least keep the rut we’re in from getting too deep.

The health and welfare of a church depends on individual participation. We use imagination and initiative in other areas of responsibility, such as civic organizations and service clubs. Can we put to work in the church that same imagination and initiative? What happens in any local church is determined by its members. If nothing happens, we have only ourselves to criticize.

Do we want a church that is pulsing with life? Then we must give due consideration to some searching questions. The most basic is: Why do we exist? Once we answer that, we must ask: Are we responsive to this purpose? Do we provide each member opportunities for commitment? Do we have the will to do whatever is necessary to be the best we can be?

Let us not forget the values that form the roadbed for our journey as a church—such values as love, truth, justice, brotherhood. If our church is to be healthy, then our faith must be one of action even more than of words. If we believe in love and justice and the worth of the individual, it must be seen in how we sell our homes, treat our acquaintances, act toward our neighbors. The values of which we so freely speak must be given the breath of life in our homes and businesses as well as in our church.

What kind of church do we want? The choice is ours. Our verbal answer goes to a world that will not listen. The real answer is seen in what we do.

—The REV. JOHN J. DRAG,

First Congregational Church, Terre Haute, Indiana.

Pollution has become a major problem in America. In many parts of the country man has so befouled the air and water that he finds himself confronted by the problem of a self-induced calamity.

Belatedly, our nation is taking vigorous steps to reduce or eliminate the causes of pollution. This action must be drastic and thorough.

By-products of industrial and technological progress are the major causes of our pollution problem. I was recently driving on a famous mountain parkway. The views were breathtaking, but in two valleys below, far removed from any city, there were modern factories, each employing hundreds of the residents of surrounding communities. From both of the high stacks there poured a greyish-yellow smoke, covering the valleys for miles. A gentle breeze was spreading this polluting vapor so that the air all the inhabitants of that area must breathe was seriously contaminated.

Only a day later I was driving by a small river that once had given pleasure to many as a site for boating, swimming, and fishing. The water was the color of strong tea, and on its surface there floated a thick scum from detergents, causing the stream to resemble an open sewer.

Commerce and normal travel also make their contribution to pollution—the contrails of high-flying jets, smoke and gases from trains, and the ever increasing problem of combustion engines with their low-level contamination of the air we breathe.

Our ability to invent and perfect things useful to modern living has not yet extended to the point where we can eliminate the by-products that adversely affect elements essential to life itself.

In addition, there is man’s proclivity to add to his problems willfully by filling his lungs with irritants.

The problem of contamination of the elements essential to life through our carelessness, insensitivity, and ineptness is one that has developed slowly. Only since the end results have become alarmingly obvious have we as a people become aroused enough to look past the effects and attack the causes.

But there is a far more serious problem of pollution in America that we have not yet begun to cope with. We are confronted with many sources of pollution of the heart and mind, and so far we are doing little to prevent this open sewer of immorality from contaminating a new generation.

Much “literature” today is, generally speaking, nothing less than intellectual, moral, and spiritual garbage—and the present generation is feeding on it. This “literature” ignores or rejects the standards of decency recognized, though not always practiced, by a past generation. The resulting pollution of the mind subverts both thoughts and deeds and caters to the lusts of the flesh, which end in death.

I am writing about what exists, not what may occur in the future. The theme of the best-sellers today is usually immorality—justified and made attractive. And even in books that do not cater to prurience there is usually an approach to life and its problems that ignores God and has as its inevitable “fallout” in the mind of the reader either a philosophical hopelessness or a false sense of man’s ability to solve his problems without God.

The wholesome and inspiring modern novel is as rare today as the pure air and snow-fed streams of the High Rockies. What most people are now reading is sure to undermine moral and spiritual concepts, without which no man can see God.

This pollution of the mind and spirit is being accelerated at an almost unbelievable degree by “daring” “adult” movies and plays that vie with one another to see how far they can go. Under the guise of realism they cater to lust and moral degeneracy. After witnessing one such play, a New York newspaper critic ended his review with, “After this what can there be for an encore?”

There is yet another area where the pollution of American life is rampant. This is the colleges and universities where God is ruled out of his universe and where his Word, if mentioned at all, is scorned as “irrelevant” to modern man and the world in which he lives.

Godless professors, under the guise of “academic freedom” and the protection of tenure, reduce knowledge to that which can be academically demonstrated or theoretically assumed while at the same time they reject the ultimate in wisdom—God’s revelation of himself. The end result of this pollution of the intellectual stream is educated pagans.

Forbidden, or unwilling, to teach true religion, many of these professors have no compunction against teaching things contrary to the Christian faith, while others are guilty of willfully attempting to destroy simple faith in God and his Word wherever they may find it. This is true in many church-related colleges as well as in state-supported institutions. (One need not ask which of the two is the more reprehensible.)

The pollution of human minds is hastened by those who under the guise of a “search for truth” willfully ignore or reject the One who is Truth. The Apostle Paul speaks of blind leaders of the blind, “men of corrupt mind and counterfeit faith” who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7).

The person and work of Christ are held in question by these seekers for “truth.” The message and mission of the Church are distorted. There is confusion over what is Caesar’s and what is God’s, over the rightful place of citizenship and how the Christian should live (whether in and of the world, or in but not of the world). These “blind leaders” are uncertain about heaven and reject the reality of hell. And the one unerring source of truth—the Bible—is rejected or interpreted away.

From these things that contaminate mind, spirit, intellect, and body, we turn to the Christ revealed in the Scriptures—contemplating with joy his supernatural life, death, and resurrection. In the Scriptures we are told how we may avoid the corrupting influences of life: “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (Phil. 4:8).

Thank God there is a way of escape: “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:3, 4).

L. NELSON BELL