NCC Chief Proposes ‘General Ecumenical Council’

Frolicking youths and indignant black militants did their best to steal his thunder, but Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy managed nevertheless to win serious consideration for a major new plan to bring American Christians together. The proposal would replace the National Council of Churches with a “General Ecumenical Council” embracing Roman Catholics and other Christians currently outside the conciliar orbit.

Espy, general secretary of the NCC, outlined the plan in a fifty-page report to the council’s triennial General Assembly in Detroit this month. He suggested that “the most comprehensive organ” of the new council might be “a Consultative Assembly in which all Christian communions and agencies could regularly gather to share their views on major issues in the life of the church and nation, speaking to their own faithful with a common voice whenever agreement is given to them.”

Espy predicted at a news conference that the new structure might be realized in five to ten years. Assembly delegates began implementation with a resolution which called for a national consultation.

The assembly was plagued by demonstrators. The first outburst came during a prayer at the opening worship service when an impudent band of hippie types rose from their seats and shouted their way out of the arena. The scene was typical of a number that followed during the next four days. The campaign was ostensibly serious—church renewal with special attention to social responsibility—but the youthful participants conveyed an impression of merrymaking.

The all-white youth group, which referred to itself as “Jonathan’s Wake” (after Jonathan Edwards), was led by the Reverend Stephen Rose, a United Presbyterian. Elliott Wright of Religious News Service reported the feeling of some observers that “there was a greater degree of attention to the ‘Wake’ than it deserved in terms of numbers. Others expressed the sentiment that the dissidents were taking the National Council more seriously than it takes itself.”

Espy’s report rejected the demands of groups such as the “Wake” by declaring that the NCC “is not an acronym for any special interest or tendency.… It is not a National Council on Christ and Culture, or a National Council of Caucasian Christians, or a National Council for Colored Control, or even a National Council of Concerned Christians. It is more basic and representative, a National Council of the Churches of Christ.”

Espy specifically dissociated himself from attempts to emphasize “radical church action to promote the basic reorganization of the social order, with special reference to the empowerment of racial and ethnic minorities. As this applies to the National Council, some would funnel all the energies of the Council into the crucial struggle for racial and economic justice.” He countered that view by contending that “the National Council of Churches cannot be fully ecumenical if it becomes subservient to one special group or viewpoint, no matter how urgent and just its cause.”

“The decade ahead,” he said, “demands of American Christians not a diminished interdenominational agency or one more private fellowship of the specially concerned but something like a General Ecumenical Council in the United States, a portent of that Universal Ecumenical Council which was the vision of the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches last year.”

As Espy sees it, the Consultative Assembly of the new American council might have two manifestations: “one an official legislative body or parliament, the other a gathering of the people of the church on the order of the Kirchentag in Germany.”

Two objectives would be achieved in the new structure, Espy asserted. “It would witness in maximum ways to the wholeness of the Church of Christ in the United States and it would enable those that are prepared to do so to move forward in social action, liturgical experimentation or anything else within broad policy guidelines without being held back by those that are disinterested, unable, or even opposed to a particular course of action.”

“It is obvious that such a pattern abandons the attempt that has caused so much frustration in our present National Council of Churches structure, namely to subordinate every aspect of divisional and departmental program to priorities established for them by a General Board constituted by proportional representation from the official member communions.”

The NCC General Secretary, an American Baptist layman with a doctorate from Yale, referred to another report presented to the assembly on “Mission in the Seventies.” That report urged the council to focus upon three main activities—being a forum for the churches’ problems and grievances, coordinating information and planning, and serving people’s needs directly on an experimental or emergency basis—plus a limited number of general or special ministries.

“Reordering of the National Council should be undertaken in full lucidity concerning our actual ecumenical situation,” Espy said. “The thirty-three communions that now comprise the Council membership gladly recognize the faith and churchmanship of the great Christion traditions not among their number, and are especially aware of the conservative evangelicals, the Pentecostalists, the Southern Baptists, the nonmember Lutherans, and the Roman Catholics. There have been many indications that at least some of these groups are also ready to recognize the faith and churchmanship of the member communions of the Council.”

The plan was also described as encouraging “the participation of independent movements and agencies directly or indirectly related to the churches which have the capacity to contribute to the unity, mission and renewal of the church. One thinks of such groups as the American Association of Theological Schools, the Protestant and Catholic College Councils, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, the American Bible Society, the National Committee of Black Churchmen, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice, ecumenical institutes, urban renewal projects, experimental ministries, the American Friends Service Committee, Greek Orthodox Youth of America, organizations of conservative evangelicals, laity programs, and other instruments of Christian mission. They could become a part of the ecumenical whole while retaining their identity and power of self-determination. The structural forms and operational guidelines to make possible the contribution of such forces by the people of the church would have to be designed with a creative blend of organizational realism and program freedom.”

Espy went on to speculate in a way that will cheer ecumenists while alarming evangelicals. “Even as a United Europe may eventually grow out of the functional integration of iron, steel, agriculture and markets, so the shape of a United Church in the United States might gradually arise out of serious, continuous joint-action-for-mission, nurtured in the atmosphere of a General Ecumenical Council. Such a United Church would be solidly founded on the experience of an ecumenical movement of united mission by the whole church to the whole society.”

Espy’s choice of the European Common Market for an analogy unwittingly reinforces the views of some evangelicals (e.g., dispensationalists) who believe the Book of Revelation teaches that world history will climax in the creation of one great united but apostate church in conjunction with a union of nations in Europe as a “revived Roman Empire.”

To date, the National Council has been incurring the disfavor of evangelicals primarily because it sees the Christian mission in terms of social action rather than evangelism. In his report, Espy openly admitted that a problem exists. “Both substantively and programmatically,” he said “the National Council is about where its member churches are on evangelism, which is in a state of confusion. The Council has done much, as it has in the fields of Christian education, stewardship, church renewal and others, to provide a forum and serve as facilitator for creative dialogue. But the role of both thought and action in most of these areas needs strengthening.”

DAVID KUCHARSKY

Christianity Still On The Move

Gloomy predictions about Christianity on the wane are authoritatively challenged in scholarly new studies. They show that the percentage of Christians in the world is still increasing.

Biggest eye-opener is a report on Africa by Dr. David B. Barrett, who serves with an ecumenical research unit in Nairobi, Kenya, and who is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University. He predicts that within ten years there will be as many Christians as Muslims in Africa and that in twenty years Christians will be a majority.

On the world scale Barrett sees that by the year 2000 Christians will constitute 31.2 per cent of the population, as compared with 28.7 in 1900.

An outline of Barrett’s analysis was presented to the National Council of Churches’ General Board on November 29 by Theodore Tucker, executive director of the NCC’s Africa department. An article by Barrett, entitled “A.D. 2000: 350,000,000 Christians in Africa,” will appear in the January issue of the International Review of Missions. An expanded version will be available in pamphlet form from the World Council of Churches.

Tucker quotes a Glasgow University scholar’s finding that the growth of Islam in Africa has been slowing down with the coming of political independence. Barrett himself is said to draw upon assorted data, including government statistics that consistently reflect higher Christian populations than the churches themselves claim.

The rate of Christian growth in Africa is calculated at 5.2 per cent, and Tucker notes that “one-third of the membership of the churches today are first-generation Christians.” In black Africa the conversion increase is put at around 3.5 per cent “due to the labors of a vast army of catechists, evangelists and laymen.”

This statistical evidence of Christian growth contrasts sharply with previous pessimism that the population explosion was causing a diminishing Christian world community. However, the analysis shows that by the year 2000 the center of gravity of the Christian world will have shifted markedly southwards. Barrett’s report says:

“Whereas during the twentieth century the Western (or Older) Churches will have doubled in size from 392,000,000 in the year 1900 to around 800,000,000 in 2000, what we may call the Third World (or Younger) Churches will have multiplied seventeen times, from 67,000,000 in 1900 to over 1,000,000,000 in 2000—larger in size than the churches in the developed world.

“This trend, which is seen most dramatically in Africa, has far-reaching significance for Christianity throughout the world. Not only is Christianity becoming the religion of a great part of black Africa … but also Christianity, which has been for long a religion of predominantly white races, will have started to have more colored than white members.…

“The numerical surge in the Third World Churches is not a massive expansion of a merely nominal Christianity. In Africa there is a church made up largely of converts, with characteristic commitment and zeal. The rapidly growing Pentecostal churches of Latin America show the same vitality, and so do other new religious groups, whose size is approaching 50,000,000 adherents.”

Disputed Choices

For the first time in the nineteen-year history of the National Council of Churches, a nominating committee’s slate was challenged this month. The contest developed when the National Committee of Black Churchmen announced it would propose candidates of its own for the offices of president and general secretary of the NCC.

The nominating committee submitted the names of Dr. Cynthia Wedel for president and Dr. R. H. Edwin Espy, the incumbent, for general secretary. The NCBC countered with the Rev. Albert B. Cleage, Jr., pastor of Detroit’s recently renamed Shrine of the Black Madonna, a congregation of the United Church of Christ, and the Rev. Leon Watts, a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Both have been leading advocates of “black theology.”

The election was held by secret ballot on the last day of the NCC’s triennial assembly in Detroit. Mrs. Wedel defeated Cleage by a vote of 387 to 93, and Espy was re-elected over Watts by 382–100.

There was little open campaigning but a great deal of behind-the-stage maneuvering. The biggest point of contention was whether to place an asterisk beside the names of the nominating committee’s choices on the ballot. Assembly delegates finally approved inclusion of the asterisk by a vote of 243–234.

The asterisk was believed to have had a measure of influence among delegates in the case of the eighteen NCC vice-presidents. There were additional nominations from the floor for most of the vice-presidential positions.

The black militants may have damaged their own cause a bit when they took over the chair following an authorized presentation long enough to “adopt” a resolution committing the National Council to refrain from resorting to civil authorities to settle ecclesiastical disputes. The resolution (most delegates abstained) apparently was aimed at discouraging the council from seeking injunctions as owners of the Interchurch Center did when James Forman staged a sit-in there last summer. Forman was one of the speakers during the black militants’ presentation.

Another showdown at the assembly brought the National Council of Churches within a gnat’s whisker of openly defying the draft law. A resolution to accept custody of the draft card of a twenty-year-old Michigan college student who opposes the Viet Nam war gained about a 55 per cent vote—but not the necessary two-thirds.

Defeat of the controversial motion, following more than four hours of debate, came after NCC legal counsel advised that endorsement of it could be interpreted as “conspiracy to thwart the selective service system.” The student, who had urged the NCC to “accept and hold in trust” his draft card, was James D. Rubins of Hope College. He was a Reformed Church in America alternate youth delegate.

Following defeat of the resolution, Berkeley (California) Free Church cleric Dick York rushed to the speakers’ platform shouting, “The blood of the Vietnamese is on your hands and is dripping from the minutes of this meeting.” He then spashed red paint on the papers of NCC officials.

Later, a resolution declaring NCC “spiritual, moral, and financial support” of Rubins was adopted.

Delegates called for a full international investigation of reports of the massacre of civilians by U. S. troops in Viet Nam. The assembly noted that “as citizens of the United States and as Christians we confess and lament our involvement in these atrocities.”

A resolution on the violation of human rights in eastern Europe, which mildly rebuked the Soviet Union for occupying Czechoslovakia and other countries “against the will of their peoples,” was shunted to committee for reworking. Several delegates said its message would be “hypocritical” in light of the council’s refusal to accept Rubins’s draft card. But no one explained just why this would be hypocritical.

Leaders of the Canadian Council of Churches and the NCC disclosed new liaison activities to help an estimated 60,000 U. S. draft-resisters in Canada. The churchmen also appealed for funds to aid the deserters and resisters.

Southern Baptist Tunes: The Fall Conventions

There was SMOGG in Georgia, hot water in Kansas, and clear reports in Texas. But the themes were strikingly similar in the twenty-nine Southern Baptist state conventions that met in late October and early November.

Federal grants to Baptist colleges and universities provided one variation on the financial theme. Texas Baptists, who own and operate ten schools, refused to allow government loans for campus construction. “To marry the institutional church to the institutional government—before Jesus Christ comes again—is prostitution,” thundered Baptist lay preacher Howard E. Butt, Jr.

In Georgia, Baptists deferred the question (by a twenty-vote margin) to committee study until next year. Trustees of Mercer University in Macon had prompted the action with their application for three federal grants for building projects. Though they were stoutly opposed by a group calling itself Save Mercer—Oppose Government Grants (SMOGG), discussion was courteous and restrained.

Southern Baptist Convention president W. A. Criswell termed denial of federal aid plus inadequate support from Baptists “ecclesiastical, denominational hypocrisy” because “we say and do not.” Baptists, he predicted, would gradually “turn our schools loose.” Florida Baptists nearly did—for only five votes kept Stetson University’s allocation in the convention’s 1970 budget.

Elsewhere, the financial theme had medical overtones. In Arizona, Baptists authorized by eight votes the sale of three hospitals and the land planned for a fourth. Nearly half the proceeds will go to support Grand Canyon College in Phoenix, which is suffering financial pangs. In Louisiana, control of Baton Rouge General Hospital went to an interdenominational board that will raise money outside Baptist sources.

State financial pinches may be felt in the SBC Cooperative Program; several conventions found it necessary to reduce their 1970 gifts to SBC. But probably no state was in hotter financial water than Kansas, which had to take major steps to cool its $1.6 million debt.

Doctrinal dialogues over “alien immersion” and liberalism occupied a number of conventions. Both Arkansas and California Baptists appointed committees to study convention policies on accepting messengers (delegates) to annual meetings from churches that accept as members persons immersed by non-Baptist churches.

Four conventions reaffirmed their support of the 1963 “Statement of Baptist Faith and Message.”

JANET ROHLER

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