Negro Methodists Map Black-Power Bloc

A national conference of Negro Methodists, meeting in a militant mood last month and embracing “black power” as the answer to racism, decided the church’s segregated Central Jurisdiction should be replaced with an all-Negro organization called “Black Methodists for Church Renewal.”

Looking ahead to the April merger meeting of the Methodists and the Evangelical United Brethren, the 250 delegates demanded that Negroes get proportional representation on all boards and agencies of the new United Methodist Church (they make up about 4 per cent of 11 million members).

There were ironical overtones to the group’s establishing the “Renewal” organization to replace the Central Jurisdiction—which it had successfully pushed into oblivion. But the Negroes saw a difference between a power base they themselves set up and a structure ordained by whites to serve as a kind of jurisdictional catch-all for Methodists with black skin. The new agency plans to hire an executive at $15,000 a year, with an operating budget of $38,000.

The delegates let it be known that the Negro voice will be heard loud and strong in the United Methodist Church. With this assertion went a not-very-veiled threat that the Church had better shape up or the Negro may ship out.

The conference concluded with lively floor fights on six papers of “findings” from committees. The one on black power asserted: “We confess our failures to be reconciled with ourselves as black men. We have too often denied our blackness rather than embrace it in all its black beauty. We are becoming new men—the old man (the nigger) is dead. The ‘boy’ is now a man. How then do we respond forcefully and responsibly to racism in America and racism in the Methodist Church? We unashamedly reply—Black Power!”

Black power was said to provide “the means by which black people do for themselves that which no other group may do for it.”

The man who coined the phrase, Methodist layman Stokely Carmichael, tiptoed down the aisle to the front pew to hear a church address by former CORE Director James Farmer. Farmer said black power is good for the nation and essential to the Negro if he is to be accepted as an equal. He said all minority groups, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants, had to form economic and political power blocs to succeed in America.

Carmichael was not introduced at the meeting and refused to talk to newsmen. He did return to the headquarters hotel to address a workshop on “Black Churchmen and the Black Revolution.” After spending the night in the hotel’s presidential suite, he slipped out of town.

The hottest floor fight at the conference was triggered by the phrase in one paper, “whether it be within or without the institution and whether it be pleasing or painful to white Methodists.”

The Rev. Merrill Nelson of Columbus, Ohio, rushed to a floor microphone and proclaimed, “I will not walk out of the Methodist Church. I will not vote for something I personally will not do.”

Then Cincinnati pastor Samuel Wright reminded delegates that the Methodist Church came out of the Church of England. “I have no hesitancy at all in walking out of an institution,” he said. “We can leave it, and if we ought to, we should. It’s a choice of radical transformation of the church or creative disaffiliation.”

When unflappable conference Chairman James Lawson of Memphis, a skilled parliamentarian, brought the issue to a vote, the explosive language was killed 51–47.

Caught up in the vortex of violence, the Negroes left open-ended the role of congregations caught in the midst of conflicts. One paper made the innocuous recommendation that the Church should “educate people relative to the role of the church in the midst of violence.” Delegates agreed that no one knew what the role was but that it should get top priority. They defeated the suggested addition of “… and, if possible, prevent violence” as part of the Church’s role.

BLOODSHED IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Negro Methodists’ concern about violence (story above) was dramatized with the news during last month’s conference that three Negro collegians had been shot and killed and fifty others wounded in the wake of demonstrations against a segregated bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. The Cincinnati conference stood for a moment of silence, then sent telegrams backing the students and deploring the killings.

The violence closed South Carolina State College, with 1,600 students, and Claflin College, nearby Methodist school with 600 students. Carolina State’s President M. Macco Nance, Jr., defended the protests but indicated that a small group of activists had taken over and that this had led to the violence and deaths.

The Rev. W. McLeod Frampton, a white Presbyterian, was named to lead the city’s new biracial Human Relations Commission. The pastor said, “Unrest and violence, hatred, prejudice, and even revolution will engulf us unless somehow we are willing to establish effective and effectual lines of communication.… No individual, no home, no community will be safe until every home and every individual is safe.…”

BAPTIST MARCH MALADY

Baptist leaders from the ten denominations joining for an unprecedented Continental Congress on Evangelism this October are running into some resistance from pastors in the host city, Washington, D. C.

National planners have scheduled a Sunday march up the Mall to proclaim Christ as “the only hope.” But one of the congress committee chairmen, Editor James Duncan of Capital Baptist, says local Baptists “are not interested” because “the psychology of this city won’t accept another parade.”

Parade equals protest in many local minds, it seems, and the shadow of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., falls over much of the discussion. King—whose Negro denomination supports the congress and the huge evangelistic drive that is to follow—plans a major “camp-in” in the capital this spring to last until Congress accedes to demands for poverty legislation.

Another potential irritant—not yet surfaced—is that D. C. churches are dually aligned with the Southern Baptist Convention, which is behind the congress, and the American Baptist Convention, which has voted against any official role.

The four-day Continental Congress will be limited to 2,500 delegates from the denominations, but the hope is to swell the ranks with thousands from the D. C. area for a final Sunday march. Despite appeals from Duncan and other local leaders, parade plans were pushed forward at last month’s steering-committee meeting. North American Coordinator W. Wayne Dehoney, past president of the SBC, gave an emotional appeal for the parade at a rally for about 200 D. C. area pastors.

Dehoney reported that the 1969 Crusade of the Americas campaign now has the support of 18 million Baptists and 100,000 congregations in twenty-seven nations of the Western Hemisphere.

A.B.C. INDECISION

The General Council of the American Baptist Convention proved indecisive on crucial issues before the denomination at the meeting that closed February 1. Ecumenicity was strongly urged, but when it became evident that Cardinal Cushing was to be among the welcoming speakers at the Boston convention in May (he seemed to have partially invited himself) the council appeared alarmed at this development.

On evangelism, President L. Doward McBain reported extensive sessions with the Home Mission Society and its evangelism department, but it was clear that no meeting of the minds had been reached. On war and peace, no significant discussion was scheduled, though at the end of the meeting Iowa pastor Heinz Grabia reluctantly offered brief personal observations from a recent Viet Nam visit. In the statement—given with strong urging from McBain and enthusiastic council reception—Grabia confessed that he had gone as something of a “hawk,” but had returned less than satisfied with that position.

The council spent major time visiting Zion Baptist Church in Philadelphia, where the Rev. Leon Sullivan has led development of an extensive job-training and employment service center. After three years, more than 3,000 persons are working as a result of the effort, with 1,400 currently in training. Sullivan will get the denomination’s peace award for 1968, along with ailing Christian Century Editor Kyle Haselden.

The council also surveyed the less concrete program of the denomination’s evangelism secretary, the Rev. Dr. Jitsuo Morikawa, which seeks to enlist Philadelphia laymen to express their faith in and through vocations.

LAWRENCE T. SLAGHT

EPISCOPAL UNDERCURRENT

Liberals in the Episcopal Church get the headlines, but a revived undercurrent of traditional theology may be developing. One indication is a small, low-key group that drew 200 persons to its third annual meeting last month, held at St. James’ Church in Leesburg, Virginia.

The group is the U. S. beachhead for the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion, the conservative group within the Church of England that includes some of the world’s best-honed evangelicals. Two of them were there: London clergyman John R. W. Stott and the Rev. Dr. Philip E. Hughes, currently teaching at Columbia Seminary in Georgia. Hughes is president of the U. S. group, but most organizational chores fall to the Rev. Peter Moore of New York, young, urbane head of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools.

The fireworks at Leesburg came from the Rev. Dr. John Rodgers, theology teacher at Virginia Theological Seminary. The heavy-set, 37-year-old theologian said, “The Good News of God’s self-disclosure in Christ is not only badly obscured but even attacked in institutions which bear his name.… The Word of God is considered to be archaic and hindering the Church.… The institutional churches to a large extent have lost the ‘pearl of great price’ in this country. Things are every bit as bad as in the sixteenth century. It is a time for reformation through the Word of God.”

Rodgers used a piece by the Rev. Dr. Daniel Day Williams in Theology Today as an example, saying that it is “wild speculation offered as Christian theology” and gives “joyous approval” to most major heresies of church history. God is described in passive terms, he said, as the mere matrix for man’s possibilities. “This is where our parishes are headed.”

In another address, his seminary colleague, the Rev. Dr. FitzSimmons Allison, discussed Freudian attacks on the fatherhood of God and asserted that the Judeo-Christian teaching is not an adolescent reversion, since the biblical God requires adventuresome service.

Suffragan Bishop Samuel Chilton of Virginia spoke on “Personal Commitment to Christ.” The meetings were also attended by a dozen Virginia seminary students, plus three from General Seminary, New York, and the Rev. Dr. Stuart Barton Babbage, president of Conwell School of Theology in Philadelphia and the former dean of the cathedrals in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.

VOICE FOR CONSERVATIVE ORTHODOXY

A crack in the Eastern Orthodox cocoon has appeared with the slim, interesting new monthly, The Logos. Orthodoxy, the first issue complains, has disobeyed Christ by remaining silent “while Protestantism and Roman Catholicism stir restlessly in a renewed quest for what has been lost.”

Editor Eusebius Stephanou, 43, priest of Holy Trinity Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is no novice. He got an A.B. in history at Michigan and a divinity degree from Holy Cross Theological School in Massachusetts, and became the first Greek Orthodox to get an earned doctorate at General Theological Seminary, the Episcopal school in New York. Other ecumenical credentials: he was the first Orthodox to teach theology at Notre Dame, and represented Orthodoxy at such meetings as the Montreal Faith and Order session of the World Council of Chinches.

The result of all this is conservative theology, conservative politics, and disquiet about the ecumenical movement born of Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic doctrinal confusion.

Answering Archbishop Iakovos’s comments to the New York Times last fall, the first issue of the journal says, “Roman Catholics and Liberal Protestants leave the preaching of the total Christ to the Fundamentalists and Southern Baptist Evangelists. They are too busy either building up the defences of the crumbling institutional Church or advocating programs of social and political reform. Whatever the case may be, they are striving for a Christianity without Christ.”

Though Logos strives to be a pan-Orthodox organ, the tone is distinctly Greek. On affairs of that troubled nation, the paper says last year’s military takeover was “a blessing.… Who ever said that freedom was an end in itself? Once it is abused, it is forfeited.… Discipline and restriction of political freedom is Greece’s salvation.”

And an Athens Orthodox paper is quoted to the effect that cooperation with Western Christians in social activity is all right “so long as all proselytism on their part is put to a stop. We shall offer prayers to God for their return to the Church … to which they belonged until the ninth century.”

STORM OVER ASBURY

The Rev. Karl K. Wilson, fired after sixteen months as president of Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, refused to vacate the president’s house January 31 as ordered, and is hoping for a change at the April board meeting.

After firing Wilson December 28, the board named as Interim President Cornelius R. Hager, graduate of the college and neighboring Asbury Seminary. Hager went on leave as an assistant extension dean of the University of Kentucky.

A board member said a list of twenty-nine specific instances of Wilson’s incompetence has been withheld for Wilson’s sake, but Wilson contends that he was never presented with the charges, and that the special board meeting was illegal.

Summing up the weeks of turmoil, campus editor Paul Delaney wrote: “Ill will, detectives, lawyers, falsehoods, and differing interpretations of ‘God’s Will’ have been used by both sides. And poor Asbury has been left so reeling that ‘holiness unto the Lord’ seems to be fighting against itself.”

Before the Christmas holiday, fifteen threatened faculty resignations were bolstered by a petition in which 200 of the 1,050 students at the conservative Methodist school threatened to protest in an “overt and forceful manner” if the board didn’t act. Now that the change has been made, several teachers are likely to leave anyway.

Wilson, who was a Methodist pastor in Canton, Ohio, followed the thirty-year reign of President Zachary T. Johnson. He was the dark-horse candidate who won when the board split between Johnson’s choice and a second man.

PRESBYTERIAN PLIGHT

With Presbyterian Professor Lloyd George Geering of New Zealand cleared of heresy charges (see December 8, 1967, issue, p. 40), conservative reactions are beginning. An independent Presbyterian fellowship has arisen in Auckland, New Zealand. A pastor in suburban Sydney, Australia (whose church includes five seminarians), has led his church into separation despite sacrifice of the property. The pastor, a hyper-Calvinist, spent ten days in New Zealand speaking at protest meetings called by the International Council of Christian Churches and the Presbyterian Laymen’s Association.

But the major evangelical Presbyterian voice, the New Zealand Westminster Fellowship, repudiated the campaign. Leading Australian evangelicals like Graham Hardy and Gordon Powell, who have the major Presbyterian churches in Sydney and Melbourne, criticized the Geering decision but as yet plan no separatist moves.

Moderates are chagrined that New Zealand Presbyterians have not rallied evangelical forces and have thus left the door open for the ICCC and others to capitalize upon the evident bewilderment. Some separatists look to the Australian Reformed Church, a Dutch-background body with twenty-five congregations.

Most evangelicals across the South Pacific are deeply concerned. Many hope to form a continuing Presbyterian body true to historical standards but without the extremist label, and view the first separation moves as immature.

On top of this, the New Zealand Assembly added fuel to the fire by distributing a pastoral letter with pleas for “liberality” and expressions of confidence in Geering’s stand.

CRAIG SKINNER

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