Protestant Union Plan Due within Two Years

The Consultation on Church Union voted without a ripple March 27 to write a plan of union for 25 million Protestants. A drafting group will propose the text to representatives of the nine denominations next March in Atlanta, or by 1970 at the latest.

The work group that made the proposal called it “reckless obedience” to God. Speed is sought both by those who want COCU to settle touchy issues and by zealots who want to get a merger through (with as few advance commitments as possible) while the ecumenical tide is still running high. This year’s sessions in Dayton, Ohio, gave plan-writers little guidance as to which controversies the merger document should face head-on.

Last year COCU had stated an open-ended commitment to work on a plan, and four commissions spent the intervening months in spotty spadework on structure, unification of ministers and members, and reaction to the basic Principles of Church Union approved in 1966.

The cap has been off the bottle for seven years now, and COCU is losing its fizz. The talks have a do-or-die atmosphere. “We do not have the time to be leisurely,” said outgoing Chairman David Colwell, who thinks COCU isn’t keeping pace with “the world’s agenda, which in theological terms is God’s agenda.”

If COCU doesn’t act, some fear, scattershot mergers will occur locally, denominational boards will go ahead and create a de facto union, and youth will declare the Church irrelevant. In a bid to that youthful grandstand, COCU told denominations to add a tenth delegate under twenty-eight years of age, but the action also will add negotiators from outside the Protestant establishment.

The second key Dayton decision was to set up COCU’s first full-time secretariat later this year. A big-name executive and a public-relations aide will get a combined salary of $32,000 a year. An annual $50,000 would go for travel and for an office in the New York City area, where most union planners are centered.COCU spent only $14,000 between April 1, 1967, and March 1, 1968.

The COCU Executive Committee met eight times since last May and stepped up the pace by ordering studies of current cooperation among denominations, guidelines for local ecumenical action, and legal obstacles to merger. (The lawyers’ advice: Go ahead, since the law is changing rapidly, and most major issues “end up” in court anyway.) This fall COCU will summon denominational executives to discuss their joint ventures. Christian-education staffs are making “definite progress in cooperative publishing.” The worship commission is urging wide use of its trial Eucharist and is working on a joint hymnal, and—with Roman Catholics and Lutherans—a common text of the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed.

With all this harmony, can COCU go wrong?

COCU’s first significant open debate on structure gave a taste of things to come. A work group proposed a 300-member “Provisional Assembly” to assume authority over the national agencies and 25 million constituents in the first stage of union. In a compromise between COCU’s present equal vote for each denomination and the “one man one vote” ideal, each denomination would have had twenty-five votes, plus extras based on membership over one million. This would have given the United Methodist Church sixty-five and the Episcopal and United Presbyterian churches thirty-five each.

Truman Douglass of the United Church of Christ, seeing a “great danger” of domination by larger churches, pleaded for an equal twenty-five votes per denomination. After an edgy one-hour debate, Douglass got a razor-thin 38–37 victory, with help from Presbyterians and the three Negro Methodist churches.

The present strategy is to leave intact the denominations’ present regional organizations, as well as their national agencies, when the united church begins. Thus, for some years the church will really be a church federation, with a unified legislative and judicial body at the top. Proponents think this will improve continuity, make it easier to get approval from the various denominations, and head off obstruction by people who wouldn’t like their new jobs in a completely reorganized union church.

But, as the work group pointed out, no church will be anxious to go under the Provisional Assembly until “vastly more important concerns” are clarified. Dayton reached an apparent consensus on maintaining the Episcopal Church’s claim to the “historic episcopate,” while allowing varying interpretations of its meaning, under an act of unification with laying on of hands by bishops, clergy, and laity. Non-episcopal groups would “set apart” bishops at that time.

But the more troublesome issue is how powerful the bishops will be. As in the U. S. Constitution, checks and balances will play a major role. COCU founder Eugene Carson Blake said on the eve of the meeting that in such a large church congregational calls of ministers would have to give way to appointment by bishops, but Dayton dodged that one.

Unifying members should prove easier than unifying ministers, but one thorny area remains: discipline. Many delegates think union would be a good time to set up more rigorous membership demands, since, as Disciples pastor William J. Jarman put it, “the Church probably has the lowest standards of any social institution.”

A background paper on discipline by Southern Presbyterian educator Rachel Henderlite said scriptural standards of behavior are drawn from an individualistic agrarian society, while today’s “man sciences” require the Church to be less certain that “one standard is to be required of all.”

COCU may yet be pressed from the left to reopen the delicate theological accord reached in the 1966 Principles. Even though COCU requires no assent to the creeds, Dayton passed a resolution to assuage those who don’t believe certain articles by pointing out the creeds’ historical and corporate nature and stressing that their use will be persuasive, not coercive.

Princeton Seminary President James McCord said early COCU consolidated the consensus of thirty years of ecumenical effort. Now it faces a “radically different theological climate” and must mesh with radicals who are less interested in keeping “the fullness of tradition” than in confronting concrete problems of mankind.

New COCU Chairman James Mathews, Methodist Bishop of Boston, said once the formal union plan is written, the “quiescent constituency” will come alive and “the sparks will fly.” The Methodists’ first action on the plan would normally come at the 1972 quadrennial, with final approval possible in 1976. But Colwell and others would like to speed this up through special conventions. An Australian Methodist observer said he is waiting to see “how serious the American Methodists are about union.”

Dayton is headquarters city of the Evangelical United Brethren, who will dissolve into The Methodist Church later this month. And, for whatever it’s worth, a local TV station ran a poll on whether people favored merger into a few Protestant groups. Eighty per cent of the several thousand who phoned in said “No.”

MANNA FROM VIRGINIA

Atheist Garry DeYoung, one of the plaintiffs in the landmark 1964 Delaware ruling against school Bible reading, has moved to Minnesota. Last Christmas he got religious songs removed from a Duluth elementary school concert. Apparently in reprisal, somebody smashed two plate-glass windows at DeYoung’s bookstore. DeYoung, in his usual mood, said he wished “washed in the blood” Christians would pay for his broken windows instead of praying for him.

Thus challenged, the Charlottesville, Virginia, Seventh-day Adventist Church took up a special collection for DeYoung’s windows. Along with the $25, Pastor Trevor Delafield sent a letter explaining that although his members disagreed with DeYoung’s atheism, they upheld his right to his own beliefs. “Christ hates the sin but loves the sinner,” Delafield reasoned. “We try to do the same thing.”

PERSONALIA

America’s ten most powerful Protestants are ranked by United Press International religion writer Louis Cassels, in the April Christian Herald, in this order: Eugene Carson Blake, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Jr., John E. Hines, Franklin Clark Fry, J. Irwin Miller, J. Howard Pew, Arthur S. Flemming, Clyde W. Taylor, Robert McAfee Brown.

R. O. Corvin is being replaced as dean of the Graduate School of Theology at Oral Roberts University by Howard Erwin. Corvin may stay to teach.

America’s number one black-power churchman, the Rev. Albert Cleage, Jr., unveiled a new inter-religious effort to mobilize white affluence in behalf of the American poor. The project, a joint effort of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, seeks to raise $10 million for pilot programs in five target cities. Cleage is co-chairman along with Presiding Episcopal Bishop John E. Hines.

Ben Hartley, editor of Presbyterian Survey, withdrew a letter of resignation after talks with a special negotiating committee named by the magazine’s board of directors. Survey is the official monthly periodical of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S.

Deaths

The Rev. Samuel H. Miller, dean of Harvard Divinity School, died in his sleep last month at the age of 68. He had planned to retire this year; Dr. Krister Stendahl, Swedish theologian at Harvard, had been named to succeed him.

Ecumenical involvement and the relevance of Christianity to modern life often occupied the former pastor’s thought. He considered the Church a boat that needed rocking before it could show twentieth-century man the way of God.

The Rev. Charles E. Fuller, radio preacher and a founder of Fuller Theological Seminary, died March 19 at the age of 80 (see editorial, p. 26).

Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian, 40, Bible teacher at Wheaton College in Illinois, will become president of Haigazian College, an evangelical school in Beirut, Lebanon, affiliated with the Armenian Evangelical Church.

Dr. Gordon Elliot Michalson was named president of the School of Theology at Claremont, California, a Methodist institution that has a cooperative relationship with the Christian Churches and the United Church of Christ. Michalson came from MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Illinois, where he has been president since 1960.

MISCELLANY

A leading rabbi proposes that chaplains in the armed forces be removed from military control. In a report to the Rabbinical Assembly, an international association of Conservative rabbis of which he is president, Rabbi Eli Bohnen said dissociation from the military establishment seems necessary so that chaplains can counsel servicemen according to conscience.

A joint degree program is planned by Kansas State University and Manhattan Bible College. Meanwhile, Messiah College, a small Christian school near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, plans to set up a “living-learning” center on the campus of state-related Temple University at Philadelphia; a group of students and faculty from Messiah will study and teach at Temple with financial help from the federal government.

Two Christian colleges in the Los Angeles area, Arlington and Azusa Pacific, will be merged this fall. Arlington operates under the Church of God of Anderson, Indiana. Azusa is an independent evangelical school.

Martin Luther King’s “Poor People’s Campaign,” set to open April 22 in Washington, D. C. has won the support of the local United Presbyterian presbytery, officials of the council of churches, and two inter-Lutheran councils. A National Council of Churches agency plans to help, too, though the NCC has taken no official stand.

L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican City newspaper, starts publication this month of a weekly English-language edition. It will be edited by Father Lambert Greenan, an Irish Dominican.

A merger of the Texas Council of Churches and the Texas Catholic Conference has been approved by both groups and now needs a two-thirds positive vote from the communions in the council to go into effect. The council counts 1.3 million members and embraces most of the big denominations in Texas. Leading outsiders are the 1.8 million Southern Baptists in Texas.

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