Manchester Crusade: Graham Battles Throat Ills

The raincoat-clad profile (see above) was familiar. Many of the 10,000 or more huddled against the cold downpour at Manchester’s Maine Road Stadium would even have said that it was Billy Graham himself. Graham, however, was confined to a London hotel room with a throat infection. The preacher was Graham’s associate evangelist and look-alike protégé, Leighton Ford, tapped to take over the first week of the Manchester crusade.

Prior to sailing for England, Graham had contracted a mild case of flu. Aboard ship, a secondary infection set in, and before a battery of television and newsreel cameras, radio microphones and press reporters at Southampton, he talked himself hoarse.

Graham was subsequently ordered to bed. His ailment seemed to defy the usual antibiotics. Preliminary meetings in Manchester were cancelled. On the eve of the actual crusade opening, doctors gave Graham a thorough examination. Their verdict: another week in bed.

Team members were gratified at the reception given Ford by the public. He preached for the first five nights, and by Friday, June 2, the crowd had doubled.

Graham was still troubled by a slight fever when he took the platform for the first time on June 3, fortified with 5,000,000 units of penicillin (average dose: 300,000).

“God will not deal with us or give us peace while we are in our sins,” he declared in a voice modulated by the effects of his ailment. “Christ’s blood is the only detergent to wash your sins away.”

Strongly in evidence was the enthusiasm of church people in Manchester. Many of the clergy followed the lead of the Rt. Rev. W. D. L. Greer, Bishop of Manchester, and pitched in with the zeal and industriousness that has made Lancashire famous.

Nonetheless, a measure of hostility was likewise evident. On the pages of the world-famed Manchester Guardian appeared a patronizing comment which reflected the deep alienation of many Mancunians from the life of the Church. “Nothing was said that would have converted the skeptics,” observed “Our Own Reporter.” “This was evangelism on a super-de-luxe best seller scale—or so it seemed.”

As often is the case, reliable statistics of the crusade’s impact were hard to track down. The Graham organization’s own publication, Decision, reported 10,000 land-line relays (closed-circuit audio transmissions) of the evangelist’s messages. The British Evangelical Alliance, which arranged the relays, said there were 1,440.

A London stenographer voiced the apparent impression of many Christians about the crusade’s effect: “We are forced to look to the Lord rather than man.”

The crusade was slated to end June 17. Graham planned to stay in Britain another week or so to address rallies in Glasgow (June 24) and Belfast (June 26). Next month he is to be in Minneapolis for a major area crusade.

Graham’S Protege: Leighton Ford

From his London sickbed, when told by physicians that he must forego the opening of the Manchester crusade, evangelist Billy Graham nominated his 29-year-old brother-in-law, Leighton Frederick Sandys Ford.

It was no snap decision. Graham has been grooming Ford for more than 12 years, ever since the two met at a Chatham, Ontario, youth rally. At that time Graham advised Toronto-born Ford to enroll at Wheaton College, his own alma mater.

An adopted child, Ford was reared a Presbyterian and was converted at an early age at a Canadian Keswick conference. He entered Wheaton in 1949, majored in philosophy, and graduated with highest honors. He won similar honors at Columbia Theological Seminary and was ordained in 1955 by the Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Presbytery. That same year Ford married Graham’s sister Jean, whom he had met at Wheaton.

It was in England that Ford joined the Graham team as an associate evangelist for the London crusade six years ago. Last month, Ford was back, this time in the unexpected key role of substituting for an ailing Graham at the outset of the Manchester crusade.

“I felt numb at first,” he said, “but then I felt a confidence that God would sustain me and that Christ would be glorified.”

Tokyo Crusade

World Vision’s Tokyo evangelistic crusade, plagued in its opening days by leftist hostility and resentment even from some Christian quarters, closed on a triumphant note with overflow crowds.

A climactic rally on Sunday, June 4, drew 22,000, largest crowd of the month-long campaign in Meiji Auditorium. That brought the aggregate attendance to more than 237,000 with 8,940 of these having responded to the Gospel invitation extended by evangelist Bob Pierce, president of World Vision, who talked through an interpreter.

A reserved-seat plan, spokesmen said, enabled an estimated 173,400 individuals to attend a crusade meeting at least once.

An intensive follow-up program was launched immediately by the 740 churches which helped to sponsor the crusade.

A pre-crusade controversy over the Tokyo government’s decision to permit the use of the auditorium by a Christian group had the effect of holding down crowds in the first days of the campaign. Momentum picked up, however, and the ensuing results left Japanese Christian leaders jubilant.

It was by far the most significant Christian mass evangelism effort ever conducted in Japan.

Professor Wilbur M. Smith of Fuller Theological Seminary, after witnessing a portion of the crusade as part of the World Vision team, brought away these conclusions:

“Here in Los Angeles … with our large Sunday audiences in beautiful churches … I think we have developed a dangerous mood of contentedness. In the city of London, on the other hand, I have always felt, in these last years, a dominant mood of spiritual indifference. But in Tokyo there is conflict and war in spiritual realms. You really feel that you are wrestling with the world-rulers of this darkness. It is agreed on every hand, that as Japan goes, so will go the Far East. She is the key to the future of that great area. But within Japan, it is what the students are going to think and do that will determine the direction and the thought of that land. For myself, I do not know any work for Christ on this earth today quite so important as the task of introducing, with clearness and in the power of the Holy Spirit, the saving Gospel of Christ, as presented in the Holy Scriptures, to the present student population of this gifted, most polite, people.”

Protestant Panorama

• Use of trading stamps in church building funds is condemned by the National Council of Churches’ Department of Stewardship and Benevolence as a “tie-in with commercialism contrary to the principles of Christian stewardship.” The Rev. T. K. Thompson, department director, cited findings of a recent consultation conducted by the NCC’s Department of the Church and Economic Life.

• The Christian Century charged this month that the American Medical Association had exerted such pressure on delegates to the recent General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church in Buffalo that the assembly had failed to adopt a resolution backing the Social Security approach to medical care of the aged. Church officials in Philadelphia denied that the assembly had yielded to any pressures, Religious News Service reported.

• Climaxing 21 years of negotiation between the Congregational Christian Churches’ General Council and the Evangelical and Reformed Church, the United Church of Christ formed out of a merger of the two bodies will declare its constitution in force at 11 A.M., July 4, as part of the new denomination’s third General Synod.

• The Peoples Church of Toronto reported a missionary offering of more than $300,000, payable within 12 months, at the close of its annual missionary convention last month.

• A ground-breaking ceremony for the new headquarters building of the World Council of Churches was scheduled for June 21 in Geneva. The $2,500,000 structure will house 250 offices and is expected to be ready for occupancy by mid-1963. It will be built on the northwest side of Lake Geneva, not far from the Palais des Nations.

• New York City’s traditionally delinquent 23rd Precinct has not had a gang shooting or youth knifing for 18 months, reports the July issue of Reader’s Digest. The record is cited in a description of the Christian rehabilitation program now being carried on in Spanish Harlem by Jim Vaus’ Youth Development, Inc.

• Choice of the term “Dominion of Canada” reflects the deeply biblical thinking of the nation’s founders, says The Pentecostal Testimony, monthly publication of The Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. An editorial in the paper’s Dominion Day (July 1) issue cites a reference to Psalm 72:8 said to have been made by Sir Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick. “The Fathers of Confederation did something unique in the area of Church and State,” the editorial says, “They neither repeated the European pattern of union of Church and State; nor did they follow the secularistic example of the United States and France.”

• Finnish churchmen are studying the possibility of following the Scandinavian trend toward recognizing women clergy. Among applicants for admission to the Theological Faculty of the Helsinki University, half are said to be female.

• The Supreme Court of Costa Rica rejected last month a Protestant appeal of a government decision to cancel a parade. The parade was to have helped celebrate Protestantism’s 70th anniversary in Costa Rica.

• A Presbyterian educational center will eventually be developed in Richmond, Virginia. The Board of Christian Education of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (Southern) plans to construct a new headquarters building in the vicinity of Union Seminary and the Presbyterian School of Christian Education. No date for construction has been set.

• An $18,500,000 sesquicentennial development campaign is planned by Princeton Theological Seminary. A 10-year fund drive will get under way next spring as part of a celebration marking the 150th anniversary of the largest seminary of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.

• A gift of $300,000 from anonymous donors was announced at commencement exercises last month of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary. The gift, contingent upon the seminary’s raising of an additional $400,000 within 12 months, will be applied toward campus relocation.

The Sunday Laws

May 29, 1961, will long be remembered in U. S. church-state annals. On that day the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of three state laws prohibiting the operation of retail stores on Sunday. The justices disagreed sharply, however, on the rationale of such prohibition and on the extent to which it should be valid.

The court came closest to unanimity in upholding the Sunday law of the state of Maryland, ruling eight to one that it is constitutional. By the same vote it upheld Pennsylvania’s Sunday law against a challenge by the chain store, “Two Guys from Harrison,” but divided six to three in upholding the law’s application against a group of Orthodox Jewish merchants in the city of Philadelphia. The court also divided six to three in upholding the law of Massachusetts as applied to the Crown Kosher Supermarket, Springfield.

Justice William O. Douglas dissented in all four cases.

The court did decide the basic issue that laws prohibiting employment or commercial activity on Sunday do not conflict with the First Amendment to the Constitution. But many related, controversial questions were left unanswered. It was the first time in 170 years that the court had reviewed the constitutional issues raised by the Sunday laws.

Chief Justice Earl Warren delivered the opinion of the court in all four cases, but he spoke for a minority of only four members of the court in doing so. Justices Felix Frankfurter and John Marshall Harlan delivered a separate concurring opinion in all four cases. Their votes when added to those of Warren and Justices Tom C. Clark, Hugo L. Black, and Charles Evans Whitaker provided the court majority.

Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., the court’s only Roman Catholic member, and Justice Potter Stewart dissented from application of the blue laws to the Jewish merchants.

The 60,000-word decision was the second longest (206 pages) in recent history, exceeded only by the steel seizure case of 1950.

Earlier last month, the court let stand a decision barring public funds to aid parochial school students. An unsigned order refused to review a lower court decision that declared it was unconstitutional for a Vermont school system to pay the tuition of high school students attending Roman Catholic schools. The possibility remains, however, that such a case would be heard in the future.

School Aid

The Kennedy administration’s public school aid bill was due to come up for debate on the floor of the House of Representatives this week. Observers seemed to be agreed that amendments to the measure to include fund provisions for parochial schools would be avoided. It now seems likely that Federal money for sectarian educational institutions will instead be made available under the umbrella of the National Defense Education Act, which set a precedent for such aid when it was first enacted in 1958 (see editorial, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, December 8, 1958).

At House hearings this month on proposals to broaden the NDEA to include parochial school aid, Msgr. Frederick G. Hochwalt urged the lawmakers to use their “ingenuity” to devise some such form of aid. Hochwalt is chief spokesman on educational matters for the U. S. Roman Catholic hierarchy.

Democratic Representative Roman C. Pucinski of Illinois told the House subcommittee on education that, although he sponsored a program of across-the-board loans to private and parochial schools last year, he is now convinced that Kennedy is correct in doubting the constitutionality of such a program.

Accordingly, Pucinski urged his colleagues on the subcommittee to give assistance to parochial schools—but to limit it to carefully selected special objectives, such as funds for science laboratories, gymnasiums for physical fitness, and electronics equipment for the teaching of foreign languages.

The New York Times reported this month that use of the NDEA as a possible vehicle for private school aid is a tactic whereby Democratic strategists hope to retain the support of Catholic-oriented legislators for the public school bill. The Senate has already passed a $2,550,000,000 companion bill for public school aid.

Deferred ‘Pact’

A New York City appeals court ruled this month that three children could remain in the custody of their Lutheran mother although she had agreed, in a pre-wedding contract, to rear them as Roman Catholics.

The court said a ruling on the “enforceability” of the pre-wedding pact could be deferred until such time as the children are mature enough to receive religious instruction.

The mother, Ruth Begley, had asked for permanent custody of the children—ages 2, 3 and 5—on the ground that her agreement with her separated Catholic husband, Hugh Begley, Jr., was unconstitutional.

According to the appeals court ruling, the welfare of the three young boys “could be better served” through award of custody to the mother. The court refused to rule on the constitutionality of the pre-marital agreement to raise the children as Roman Catholics.

Mr. Begley had earlier received custody of the children.

Sacred Cinema

The book-of-the-month-club technique is being applied to Protestant film distribution by a newly-organized arm of Good News Productions, Inc., of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania.

Through the firm’s new distribution organization, known as Sacred Cinema, churches will be able to book quality films from a number of producers.

Among six films which will comprise the first year’s program, set to begin in the fall, are a Christian musical, a historical missionary film from Japan, and a movie based on Joseph Bayly’s The Gospel Blimp.

Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., president of Good News Productions, says films will be available on an annual subscription basis only, but that the booking of the series will make possible substantial savings for churches which would otherwise rent a similar number of films on an individual basis.

Ike And Church

Former President Eisenhower and his wife are reported to be attending church regularly.

“General and Mrs. Eisenhower officially united with the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church on February I,” said the Rev. Robert A. MacAskill. “I am pleased to report that both he and Mrs. Eisenhower are regular in their church attendance. We recently conducted a building fund campaign and General Eisenhower manifest a real interest and participation.”

When Eisenhower returned to Washington for the first function held in his honor since he left office, he brought MacAskill with him. The pastor was invited to deliver both the invocation and the benediction at a testimonial dinner in the Washington National Guard Armory.

The Imperative Mood

Adolf Eichmann, due this week to take the stand in his own defense, may soon learn his fate. His trial in Jerusalem marks the first time in 2,000 years that the destiny of so many hinged upon the deeds of one person.

One of the more interesting exchanges at the trial proceedings last month involved a German clergyman, Dr. Heinrich Gruber, called to the stand as a witness.

Here is how a portion of the questioning went with Dr. Robert Servatius, defense counsel:

“You said, sir, that you found the accused to be like a block of ice or marble whose feelings never showed. Did you try to influence him—did you, as a clergyman, try to appeal to his feelings, preach to him and tell him that his conduct was contrary to morality?”

“I always maintained during my life, and this is still my opinion, that deeds are much more effective than words; and if the accused did not come to the right way of thinking after I’d attempted to help people, I believed that words would have been useless. But I might add that there were occasions when I expressed my sense of mission and my feelings as a priest, and tried to explain.”

“Mr. Witness, you have replied to my question to that extent that you made it clear that you did not preach to the accused; you did not say anything. You expected him to be influenced by your personal example.…”

“… Preachings must not be heard always in the imperative. A preacher is not good if he always uses the imperative mood. And I want to relate to the Court: I once arrived tired to the office in Kurfuerstenstrasse and had the impression that the accused had a good day, and a day of good will perhaps. Maybe he sympathized with me and said, Why all this activity on your part? No one will thank you for your doings, for your activities for the benefit of the Jews. There will be no thanks coming from them.’ I answered him because I believed that this is a man who once belonged to the Templars’ Order and as such knows Palestine. I said, ‘Do you know the road leading from Jerusalem to Jericho?’ and he nodded. I said, ‘On this road there was once a Jew brought down by robbers, and he who had helped that Jew was a man who was not a Jew. The God whom I worship, he told me, Go and do as he did.’ This is what I told the accused.”

“That answer will do …”

Cuba’s Protestants

Persistent reports confirm that Protestant clergy in Cuba are badly split over support of the Castro regime.

One report says that when Baptist ministers in Havana discovered that a fellow clergyman had been captured as a chaplain with the unsuccessful invaders, they unfrocked him.

Another report, however, declares that the Cuban Council of Churches ousted its executive secretary, Dr. Raul Fernandez Ceballos, a Presbyterian minister, because of his activities in Castro’s government. He was said to have been succeeded by Dr. Manuel Diera Bernal, a Methodist minister.

Appeal for Angola

Prominent North American churchmen endorsed an appeal to President Américo Tomás of Portugal this month for an end to bloodshed in Angola.

In an open letter, 80 churchmen and laymen urged establishment of a consultation of Portuguese government leaders and Angolan representatives “to seek a reasonable solution” to halt indiscriminate killings of Portuguese and Africans.

Christian missionaries in Angola have reported that at least 1,000 white residents and 8,000 Africans have been killed in rebel attacks and government reprisals. Of 165 ordained African pastors in the region of Angola’s capital city, Luanda, 17 have been reported killed and about 30 imprisoned.

Among those signing the appeal were the Rev. Theodore L. Tucker, secretary of the Africa Committee of the National Council of Churches, Dr. Arthur Lichtenberger, presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the Rev. W. J. Gallagher, general secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches.

The letter to the predominantly Romanist government of Portugal was sponsored by the NCC’s Africa Committee and a corresponding administrative arm of the Catholic Association for International Peace. Roman Catholic signers included Edward Skillen, editor of The Commonweal.

An NCC official said original impetus for the letter had come from Christian missionaries in Angola who “were anxious that nothing was being done” to halt the violence.

Reports smuggled from Angola charge that armed Portuguese settlers have burned and looted a number of American Protestant mission institutions.

Wesley on Horseback

An equestrian statue of John Wesley—the gift of a prominent Briton—was dedicated last month on the campus of Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D. C. The life-size bronze is the only copy of one in Bristol, England.

Donated by Lord J. Arthur Rank, noted British film producer who is a prominent Methodist layman, the statue is thought to be the only one of Wesley in this country.

The dedication took place on the 223rd anniversary of the famous “heartwarming experience” of Methodism’s founder.

The British Scene

Retirement of the 74-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, on May 31 climaxed an interesting month on the British religious scene.

Tributes to Fisher included a dinner in his honor given at the House of Commons by Sir Cyril and Lady Black on behalf of the Free Church Federal Council. Some 100 representatives of the free churches of England were on hand.

Fisher received a farewell gift of $5, 600 from diocesan clergy and laity. It was presented as he presided over his last diocesan conference.

In his final presidential address to the Convocation of Canterbury, Fisher appealed to Anglicans to join Roman Catholics in praying for the success of the forthcoming Second Vatican Council. He said they should pray especially that the council “may be used of God not to hurt, but to help, and also increase the unity of spirit among all churches.”

It was his attitude toward Rome that provided the only controversial note to his retirement as titular head of the world Anglican communion. (Fisher was succeeded by Dr. Arthur M. Ramsey, who moved up from the see of York, which has the Church of England’s only other archbishopric.)

During a debate on Christian unity in the House of Lords, Viscount Alexander of Hillsborough, a prominent Baptist and president of the United Kingdom Council of Protestant Churches, scored what he described as a “Romeward tendency” in the Church of England.

The Earl of Arran, an Anglican, praised Fisher’s visit to Pope John XXIII last December.

The General Assembly of the Church of Scotland subsequently voted to study the possibility of sending its moderator on a similar mission. By a large majority, the assembly instructed its Inter-Church Relations Commission, together with the General Administration and Colonial and Continental Committees, to explore the idea.

The present moderator, Dr. Archibald Campbell Craig, will be in Rome next year to take part in celebrations marking the centenary of the Scots Kirk (St. Andrew’s Church) there.

Dr. Roy Sanderson of Glasgow had remarked before the assembly that Craig ought to take advantage of his stay in Rome to meet the pontiff. The Rev. J. Walsh Wemyss of Fife declared that “as Presbyterians, we should show no eagerness in running to Rome.”

Convention Circuit

The following report was prepared forCHRISTIANITY TODAYby Dr. Harold Lindsell, dean of the faculty at Fuller Theological Seminary:

The Conservative Baptist movement has come of age in the 18 years since its founding during World War II, when the group ceased to be a part of the then Northern Baptist Convention. Meeting last month in Portland, Oregon, in the new Memorial Coliseum, more than 2600 messengers represented over 1300 churches affiliated with the Conservative Baptist Association of America.

Governor Mark Hatfield of Oregon, himself a Conservative Baptist, spoke to a Sunday evening crowd of more than 7700. Dr. Oswald Smith of the Peoples Church in Toronto was the inspirational missionary speaker who challenged his audiences to complete the Great Commission in this generation. On invitation, 165 young people accepted the challenge to missionary life commitment.

The Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society reported that, having begun with an income of $42,000 for 1943, the 1960 receipts were $2,155,000, a seven per cent increase over the previous year. The society added 20 missionaries to its staff during the year, bringing the present total to 390. Some 1743 different churches contributed to the support of the program in 1960–61. Dr. Lester Thompson of Denver was re-elected president of the society.

The Conservative Baptist Home Mission Society received almost $600,000 in income for 1960 to care for the 94 missionaries supported by this cooperating agency. Dr. Charles Anderson of Bloomfield, New Jersey, who addressed the convention, was re-elected president.

The Conservative Baptist Association of America re-elected the Rev. James Stuart of Auburn, New York, as president. During the business sessions a budget of more than $50,000 was approved and a motion adopted to authorize construction of a headquarters building. Seventy new churches were received into the association during the past year. A number of resolutions were introduced to the body, some of which failed of passage after debate. One bidding to bar admission of Red China to the United Nations was rejected on the ground that separation of church and state made such a resolution incongruous. The association voted to commend the House Committee on Un-American Activities for its work and especially for “its accurate portrayal of the San Francisco hearings as presented in the film ‘Operation Abolition.’ ” This same resolution condemned communism and resolved to alert the churches to the “reported infiltration of pro-Communist influence and ideology in the NCC and WCC.” Another resolution alerted pastors and other church workers “to the seriousness of accepting degrees from non-reputable institutions or diploma mills.”

A negatively worded resolution against ecumenism as represented by the NCC and WCC was softened by an added paragraph moved from the floor, which called upon Conservative Baptists to do all in their power to secure a genuine, biblical and spiritual rather than organic unity, based on doctrine and the unifying work of the Holy Spirit. Oddly enough, one resolution was adopted which urged against Federal aid to parochial schools but which, while it objected to centralized and bureaucratic control of local and state affairs by the Federal government still did not strike out against Federal aid to education as such. Objection was raised to the “growth and infiltration of Roman Catholic clericalism in our government.”

Outside of a plea for revival by Dr. John B. Hauser, during the Bible hours, the most significant address was delivered before 400 guests at a banquet given by the leading conservative Baptist theological seminary, located in Denver. President Vernon Grounds spoke of “correcting the fundamentalist corrective.” He stated that fundamentalism in 1961 stands in crying need of a deep-seated reformation. Using the Pharisees as an example of a false separation after the Exile and the French Revolution with its extremes, he described the action-reaction, pendulum-like motion of fundamentalism. He asserted that fundamentalism has slipped downgrade and is heading toward spiritual degeneracy if the brakes are not slammed on and a corrective to the correction applied. “Fundamentalism,” he said, “has become the victim of its own virtues,” in which doctrine has been divorced from life, the evangel from ethics and the sword of the Spirit received undue stress at the expense of the fruit of the Spirit. The seminary president called for a revival to correct this unbalance.

The Conservative Baptist movement on the whole seemed more inclined toward the moderate perspective of the majority than toward the extreme right wing element which had been militantly vocal in pressing its claims.

Here are reports of other religions assemblies:

At Warwick, New York—It’s time for churches to “practice what they preach” and submit to a thorough examination of their housekeeping, 60 church administrators decided at a three-day consultation sponsored by the National Council of Churches’ Department of Church and Economic Life. A report adopted by conferees concluded that not only are many ministers underpaid but that inadequate provisions are made for pensions and insurance and that improvement is needed in the personnel practices for church secretaries, janitors, and other employees. The report also noted that the day of the church bazaar has almost disappeared as fund raising methods increasingly exclude commercial activities.

At Caux, Switzerland—Dr. Frank Buchman told the World Assembly of Moral Re-Armament that the world “must find a new ideology or face the alternative risk of global suicide.” Buchman, founder of MRA, delivered an address on his 83rd birthday to 1,130 delegates from 46 nations.

At Willow Grove, Pennsylvania—Dr. Gordon H. Clark was elected moderator of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America at its 138th General Synod.

At Omaha, Nebraska—Some 200 delegates to the 48th annual convention of the International Union of Gospel Missions adopted a resolution opposing the use of religious symbols in the advertising or promotion of beer and liquor. The resolution declared that of the nearly 5,000,000 who came to missions for help in the year ending May, 1961, 80 per cent were affected by alcohol. The International Union of Gospel Missions comprises more than 260 missions in the United States and abroad. Leonard C. Hunt, superintendent of the Wheeler City Mission of Indianapolis was elected president for the coming year.

At Boston—Unprecedented challenges and opportunities presented by the current world upheaval require greater spiritual alertness, the Christian Science Board of Directors said at the annual meeting of The Mother Church, First Church of Christ Scientist. Mrs. Mary Lee Gough Nay, a Christian Science teacher and practitioner of Boston, was named president of The Mother Church for the coming year. A report showed that new branches of The Mother Church were established during the year in Ghana, Uruguay, and other areas outside of the United States.

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