The breadth of evangelical participation in the U. S. Congress on Evangelism still was not wide enough to encompass two out of four kinds of evangelicals. Both the Minnesota Baptist Convention and the American Council of Christian Churches urged their constituencies not to cooperate with the Congress. In endeavors of this nature, obvious non-participants are the many evangelicals (perhaps a majority?) who view their own denominational distinctives as so important that they are not able to cooperate even in limited ways with those from other denominational families. Countless Baptists (including those in the MBC), Calvinists, “Christians” (members of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ), Lutherans, Mennonites, and others from less well-known traditions practice virtually total separation from other evangelicals even though there is only partial disagreement. Believers can hardly be expected to alter their convictions on disputed matters without due cause. We do urge, however, that everyone make a greater attempt to distinguish between those beliefs that separate Christians from non-Christians and those that divide Christians among themselves. In a world that seems to be increasingly indifferent to the claims of Jesus Christ, can we afford to continue the luxury of complete internal fragmentation when there is only partial disagreement?

Yet among those evangelicals who have realized the need to cooperate in certain matters across denominational barriers there are still the distinct kinds, one of which does not usually participate in such nondenominational ventures as the Congress on Evangelism. This kind includes brethren like those in the ACCC (which includes Baptists, Presbyterians, Wesleyans, and members of Bible churches), who issued a carefully prepared statement explaining their non-participation. They have recognized the value of interdenominational cooperation. Yet though they are willing to work together despite differences on such matters as baptism, church government, or predestination, they have not yet been willing to work together with evangelicals who differ with them on the question of remaining in denominations in which non-evangelical doctrines are also advocated.

A third kind of evangelical comprises those who are in consistently evangelical denominations or fellowships. This kind of evangelical is willing to cooperate in nondenominational evangelical ventures with brethren who remain within mixed groups. He is not thereby associating with non-evangelicals directly, though he is associating with evangelicals who do, in other contexts, have some kind of religious ties with non-evangelicals. In effect the third kind of evangelical regards the difference over membership in mixed groups to be parallel to differences over the traditional denominational distinctives.

The fourth kind of evangelical is the one who remains in a denomination that was once consistently orthodox, but over the past few generations has become permeated with non-evangelical teaching and practice. These evangelicals, often because they do not choose to use their own denominational agencies, sponsor, together with the third kind of evangelical, many of the nondenominational schools, missions, publishers, youth groups, and other enterprises that have arisen largely in this century.

If all evangelicals were forced out of the mixed denominations (the way that evangelical professors have been made unwelcome at many colleges and seminaries that were once orthodox), this would remove the major difference among the three kinds of evangelicals who do believe in cooperation across denominational lines. But until that happens, a greater willingness to understand and respect the positions of those with whom one disagrees is called for. The witness of those in the ACCC to what they believe to be the scriptural teaching on separation from any religious association with nonevangelicals would perhaps have more influence if they were more ready to associate with those they are able to acknowledge as evangelicals. Just as Baptists and Presbyterians do not have to abandon their respective views when they come together in the ACCC, so evangelical separatists and non-separatists can and should join together from time to time in united testimony to their common Lord and Saviour.

The National Council of Churches recently ordered a poll on what people think of it, and we must admire the council leaders for their candor in releasing as much of the resulting information as they did. Considering that inclusivism and relevance have been major goals of the council, the picture drawn by the poll is not very encouraging.

Particularly disappointing to the National Council is the indication that 40 per cent of American adults have never even heard of it. Of those who know of the council, about 55 per cent are said in general to approve of it. Twenty-two per cent disapprove, and 23 per cent have no opinion.

The great divide comes at the point of the council’s practice of taking sides on selected social questions. About 59 per cent of all those polled said they disapprove of the involvement of the churches in social and political issues such as the urban crisis, Viet Nam, and civil rights. Some 37 per cent approved. The remainder were indifferent or undecided.

Interestingly enough, it was found that the people who approve of the churches’ social involvement are generally those who don’t seem to care to involve themselves in the churches. People who attend church every Sunday, it was shown, are much more likely to object to corporate involvement in social issues than those who go irregularly.

We hope that American church leaders will take serious note. In a few weeks the National Council will be holding its triennial assembly, and it is a good time to go back to some definitions. The council needs to re-evaluate its goals and its responsibility to its constituency.

Council spokesmen make much of the need to be “relevant,” of the summons to “prophetic leadership.” Realistically translated, this has meant little more than partisanship on how some widely publicized social problems are to be solved. The poll raises the question whether this really constitutes relevance. Consider that after nearly two decades of National Council pronouncements, 40 per cent of the adults in one of the most literate countries in the world still are not even aware of the council’s existence. Honesty requires the acknowledgment that relevance has not been achieved. The lesson seems to be that the equating of Christian compassion with the adoption of social pronouncements has been a tragic mistake, a waste of resources, and a major source of division.

The poll strongly suggests that the twin goals of relevance and inclusivism might be incompatible. Falling revenue (see News, page 44) underscores the gravity of the situation. The National Council of Churches should face up to the fact that it is not inclusive in any realistic sense—indeed, that it is a minority element in American Christendom. It seems apparent that the leaders of the constituent denominations of the council are somewhat indifferent toward it, to say nothing of the laymen. And how does the NCC propose to raise $500,000 for blacks when it cannot even meet its own budget?

The main point to be recognized is that American Christians need to get together on something more basic than a collective posture on a handful of social issues. The ecumenist-activist coalition should rethink the parable of the Good Samaritan. There is no record that any of the principals endorsed reparations or adopted resolutions or testified before the Roman legislature. We fulfill the spirit of the parable when Christians, conciliar or otherwise, take it upon themselves as individuals to be neighbors in the biblical sense. This is the goal for which the council and its member churches should strive.

Almost anyone who has recently served on a pulpit committee will readily agree that one of the most pressing problems presently confronting the Church is a shortage of pastors. Many pulpits are vacant; there simply are not enough ministers to go around. Serious though this problem may be, there is another kind of ministerial shortage that is limiting the effectiveness of the Church even more drastically. The reason for this shortage is that very few Christians seem to take seriously the biblical teaching—exemplified by the pattern of evangelism in the early Church—that every Christian is to be a minister.

Paul states this principle when, in speaking of the gifts Christ has given to his Church (apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers), he states the purpose for which they have been given: “He did this to prepare all God’s people for the work of Christian service [literally “the work of the ministry”], to build up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12, Good News for Modern Man). Paul is not saying here, as an extra comma in the Authorized Version implies, that the building up of the saints and the work of the ministry are two different purposes for which Christ gave the gifts mentioned. He says that the saints are to be built up in order that they—not just the apostles and pastors and prophets—might do the work of the ministry.

The distinction between clergy and laity that sees the minister as the paid professional responsible for carrying on the work of the Church is foreign to the New Testament. The New Testament picture of the Church leaves no place for spectators. In the early Church, everyone was involved in caring for the needs of others in the community (Acts 2:43–47). When persecution came upon the Church and Christians were forced to flee in all directions, “they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word” (Acts 8:4). One reason that the early Church turned the world upside down for Christ is that the total membership mobilized for action.

The relatively few who have been ordained to the gospel ministry cannot begin to do all the work that needs to be done. God doesn’t intend that they should. Their responsibility is to minister in such a way that every Christian will be better equipped to become involved in some way in the awesome task that faces the Church. While we concern ourselves with making sure that our pulpits are filled by clergymen, let us also endeavor to see that the pews are filled with ministers.

The World Council of Churches got evangelism when its Central Committee admitted two new denominations last August. The addition of the Pentecostal Brazil for Christ Church and the indigenous African Church of Christ on Earth gives the WCC a “blood transfusion,” said committee vice-chairman Pauline Webb.

The Brazil for Christ Church, according to its founder and president, joined the council to benefit from WCC efforts in social action and ecumenical relations. But, adds Manuel de Mello, the WCC can learn something about evangelism from his denomination: “We are in the jet age, but from the religious point of view, the World Council is still riding a bicycle.”

With 1.1 million members, the 17-year-old Brazil for Christ Church is the second largest Pentecostal group in South America. De Mello attributes its rapid growth to congregational participation in worship services.

The African church stresses revivals and healing services. Begun in 1921 by Simon Kimbangu, a Congo preacher and “prophet,” the church now numbers three million. It’s the only African church in the WCC not founded by Western missionaries.

The possible combining of the National Council of Churches and American Roman Catholics into one common federation of churches is moving ahead on a new front. The Rev. David Bowman, S. J., who was the first priest to become a full-time staff member of the NCC, has been assigned as a personal deputy to Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, NCC general secretary, according to Detroit Free Press religion editor Hiley H. Ward.

Ward said Bowman told him during an interview at the NCC General Board meeting in Indianapolis: “I will, for the next year, help facilitate Roman Catholic membership in local councils of churches.” Bowman said four state councils have asked him to help set up combined Protestant-Catholic councils, and more may soon do likewise.

Bowman predicted a common national council could be created “in the foreseeable future” but “not less than five years.” Meanwhile, the NCC General Board added a sixth Roman Catholic to its executive staff, the Rev. Richard W. Rousseau.

Just grievances long officially ignored, police misbehavior, left-wing infiltration of the civil-rights movement, Roman Catholic attitudes, and the Paisleyite capacity for inflaming passions—these factors contributed to the recent violence in Northern Ireland, according to a report released last month.

Charged to investigate the disturbances that began last October and the bodies concerned in them, a three-man commission with Scottish judge Lord Cameron as chairman crammed into four months and 124 pages what must be the most impartial account ever compiled of affairs in the troubled province.

As part of the background, the report saw “a widespread sense of political and social grievance for long unadmitted and therefore unredressed by successive Governments of Northern Ireland” with an impregnable political majority encouraging complacency and insensitivity to criticism. The “remarkable width” of police powers in Northern Ireland was seen to conflict with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and with a fundamental principle of English law.

The report states that the segregated education insisted on by Roman Catholics “plays its part in initiating and maintaining division and differences among the young.” It sees the emergence of a much larger Catholic middle class “less ready to acquiesce in the acceptance of a situation of assumed (or established) inferiority and discrimination.” Careful documentation clearly establishes the existence of such sectarian and political discrimination in various areas, involving housing allocation, local authority appointments, limitations on local electoral franchise, and deliberate manipulation of ward boundaries.

The commission recognizes the grievances felt by Catholics about the Ulster Special Constabulary (a police auxiliary), the recruitment for which “is in practice limited to members of the Protestant faith,” but states that their use during the recent disorders was marginal.

J. D. DOUGLAS

The Black Manifesto, according to a black Baptist minister, is “the same old Red manifesto painted black and an echo of the Communist demands of Karl Marx.” The Rev. Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention, U. S. A., Inc., said the convention wouldn’t “spend a dime” for “reparations.”

At the black denomination’s eighty-ninth annual assembly, Jackson declared his opposition to the National Council of Churches’ call for $500,000 to go to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization and the National Committee of Black Churchmen (see page 44). The National Baptist Convention, third-largest Protestant denomination, is an NCC member.

During the mid-September meetings in Kansas City, Missouri, Jackson was elected to his eighteenth term as president of the denomination. Although the 14,000 delegates chose him by acclamation, his election was opposed by leaders of a group of Concerned Clergy.

The Rev. Timothy P. Mitchell of New York and the Rev. L. K. Curry of Chicago said some black Baptists were concerned that the convention failed to grapple with “the burning issues affecting race or nation.” The 1,000-member group offered a resolution asking foreign-mission assistance to “their starving black brothers in Biafra” and home-mission aid for domestic needs. “All we want,” said Mitchell, “is to make our church relevant to the social concerns of six million members.”

The representatives of those members supported their president by passing all the resolutions he proposed. In addition to their criticism of the Black Manifesto, delegates disapproved of black militancy as leading to a “disastrously” divided country. “For militants to condemn every white Christian as a racist,” said Jackson, “is not only untrue, but diabolic.”

The delegates also declared their commitment to racial integration. Said their president: “The civil-rights movement … must cease to be a campaign of color, that is, of Negro Americans against white Americans.… The goals should be not Negro rights alone but the rights of all Americans. The emphasis must be as much on civil responsibility as on civil rights.”

Convention delegates also recommended clemency for Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay), who was convicted of draft evasion. Such clemency, said Jackson, would help reduce tensions and hatred in the nation.

Congressional Mailbag

Congressman John Anderson, Illinois Republican, gets a lot of letters from people who say they are evangelical Christians. He’s not always happy about that mail, however. He says most evangelicals write about “the traditional don’ts”: liquor, tobacco, and pornography. Only a few write about war, peace, poverty, or civil rights.

Conversations with two others on Capitol Hill, Senators George McGovern (South Dakota) and Mark Hatfield (Oregon), bear him out: The moral issues evangelicals most often write their congressmen about are personal vices rather than broad social evils.

“I’m afraid his remarks are right,” said McGovern, a liberal Methodist whose pastor in Mitchell, South Dakota, made headlines this summer by demanding that the movie Candy be prohibited in local theaters. Mail from religious conservatives deals more with peripheral than with substantive issues. “Getting a pamphlet in the mail with a naked woman on it seems to disturb these people more than hunger or poverty,” McGovern said.

Baptist Hatfield, who receives about ten letters a day from “clearly religious people,” said many could be called “crackpot”: “People speak of their Christian commitment, then take off on a tirade, usually on petty issues, sometimes in filthy language.” He recalled one that opened by calling the senator an obscene name, then closed, “Sincerely in Christ.”

Asked to explain these tendencies—either to send scorching letters or to skirt major issues—the legislators interviewed offered somewhat different answers.

“Traditionally the church has been interested more in the petty don’ts,” said Congressman Anderson, a member of the Evangelical Free Church. “There still is a tendency for evangelicals to represent pretty parochial views. Too many Christians need a broader base of knowledge. The fact that the Bible is inspired does not mean that everything evangelicals write is. A lot of it is patent nonsense; yet uninformed housewives read it, become concerned, and send off letters about peripheral issues.”

McGovern thinks issues such as smut in the mails are “easier to identify as sinful and, certainly, safer since no one is in favor of smut.” Some of the social sins, on the other hand, “are so enormous that people just don’t recognize them. I think hunger is a terrible sin; but it’s so big that many look right by and don’t see it.”

To Hatfield, the problem stems more from “a lack of political background or orientation”—as in the old-time minister who was wise in the Scriptures and hence felt himself expert in all fields, even those about which he was ignorant. In Hatfield’s opinion, this leads to a simplistic approach.

Of course, not all narrow-issue mail is from religious people. And both Hatfield and Anderson agreed there are signs evangelicals may be gradually broadening the scope of their letters to legislators.

What kinds of political initiative are influenced by religion? Here all agreed that faith, for one thing, had influenced their social views. McGovern and Hatfield emphasized that Christ’s teachings on love had spurred their own broad support of government action to combat social ills.

“Some people say we can’t afford to deal with poverty, others that we can’t afford not to for fear the cities will blow up,” said McGovern. “To me, those arguments are secondary. If people are hungry, that’s reason enough to deal with it. Hunger in affluent America is sin, a violation of personhood.”

Hatfield, pacing the floor, his voice rising emotionally, largely agreed: “My civil-rights views resulted from studying Acts 10 (Peter’s vision of unclean beasts) and praying about it. To me, God’s words to Peter became irrefutable commands. There can be no distinction in housing, buses, or education.”

In contrast, the athletic Mizell flashed a winning, boyish smile and said he thought it important to remember not only John’s words about love but also Paul’s command that men work if they want to eat. “I’m in favor of doing all we can for those who can’t help themselves, like children and the aged,” he explained. “The Christian must have compassion even as Christ did. But those who can should work.”

Then there was Congressman Anderson, a studious attorney who speaks thoughtfully and with an air of conviction. “Religion has increased my awareness of urban problems,” he said. “It was my religion that caused me to cast the deciding vote in favor of last year’s civil-rights bill.

“At the same time, I’m theologically conservative. I believe in total depravity. So I can’t join some liberals who say, ‘Every day, every way, life is getting better and better.’ We must fight poverty; but men will always sin against God and contribute to their own impoverishment no matter what efforts we make. Sinful nature is a limiting factor. The final answers are spiritual.”

Religion also has affected each man’s attitude on war. McGovern, one of the Senate’s first Viet Nam doves, said: “I just couldn’t reconcile Viet Nam with elementary religious faith. I thought six years ago this stand would defeat me; but I decided I couldn’t live with myself if I frittered away a term just to be re-elected. So I came out against the war.”

Hatfield, also a dove, traces his opposition back to the old Sunday-school song: “Red and yellow, black and white / All are precious in His sight.” “In World War II,” he reflected, “we had been taught to hate the Japanese as slant-eyed yellow-bellies. When the war was over, I entered Japan with the occupation troops. One day we quite effortlessly found ourselves sharing sack lunches with those very Japanese we had been taught to hate.

“That was a lasting experience. For the first time I saw the universality of God. He was there too. He was no longer a white, Anglo-Saxon Republican American. Love, I found, is practical. For the life of me I can’t comprehend a Christian who thinks the answer, even to Communism, is kill, kill, kill.’ ”

There was general agreement that working on Capitol Hill brings unique chances to share one’s faith. Anderson noted opportunities to speak before widely varied groups and “point out the need of greater spiritual emphasis in our society.” Said Mizell: “The way we live every day, the way we talk, the things we participate in—these speak loudly on the Hill.”

“It’s important to remember,” added Hatfield, “that witness is part and parcel of a man’s faith. Faith has to be shared, and by the very fact that you have given a witness others come to demand more of you. That, in turn, gives you a greater responsibility here to live up to what people expect of you.”

Finally, the congressmen generally felt that faith helps at election time—if beliefs are sincere.

“Voters have to feel your faith is deeply and conscientiously held,” said Anderson. “If they’re sure of that, certainly faith is an asset.” Mizell agreed—and so did Hatfield and McGovern, though they added that no Christian should feel bound to vote for a man of political views different from his own, simply because of his faith.

“You see, you can’t really draw a Christian-non-Christian voting line,” concluded Mizell.

JAMES HUFFMAN