National Council of Churches: Melancholia in Memphis

An unseasonably warm sun parted rain clouds over Memphis one day in January as America’s ecumenical elite marched to the Lorraine Motel to pay tribute to the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Weathermen had announced a 70 per cent chance of showers, but the rain never came. It was a bit of good fortune in an otherwise melancholy four-day meeting of the National Council of Churches’ General Board.

“The honeymoon is over for the ecumenical movement,” the board was told by a Roman Catholic priest, and most members seemed to feel it. The issues of black power, violence, Biafra, and the Middle East pressed in upon the meeting, but the board had not a prophetic word about any of these. There simply was no consensus.

One resolution adopted by the 250-member board reaffirmed an earlier statement condemning Soviet-led intervention in Czechoslovakia. The reaffirmation was introduced by United Presbyterian Stated Clerk William Thompson after the board’s executive committee sought to derail consideration of the Czech question on grounds that NCC specialists had not given the matter enough study. The new statement tempers the previous one by “acknowledging that our country itself has been guilty of oppression.” A five-man delegation from the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow witnessed adoption of the resolution.

Other guests at the meeting included a denim-clad black-militant group known as “The Invaders,” who sought to capitalize upon the opportunity by demanding $51,000 for a program among local poor people. When no immediate promises of the money were made, an Invader leader took the floor to hurl obscene epithets at churches in general and the NCC in particular.

Traditionally the NCC has sought to be in the vanguard of social movements, but direct alignment with separatist black-power causes would mean repudiation of much that the council stood for in the fifties and sixties. A pronouncement adopted by the NCC General Assembly on December 5, 1957, declared that community practices that segregate or discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin “are contrary to the Christian principle that all men are beings of worth in the sight of God.”

The most heated exchange on the floor of the General Board was produced by charges that the NCC had not done enough for oppressed blacks in Memphis and in Wilmington, Delaware. The Rev. Charles S. Spivey, Jr., who heads the council’s racial efforts, denied that the NCC had not participated in confrontations in those cities.

NCC officials also refused to be drawn out on the political and economic issues behind the struggle in Nigeria/ Biafra, though it was announced that more than $3,000,000 had been raised for relief work there. Middle East tensions and growing animosity between Jew and black in the United States were also ignored.

The Rev. Eugene Carson Blake acknowledged the adverse effect of current social problems upon the Church in a conciliatory speech before the board. The general secretary of the World Council of Churches noted “great theological confusion today, and a plethora of second thoughts about ecumenism in many quarters,” but said he saw no reason to expect any “radical change of direction or any great decrease of momentum” in the conciliar-ecumenical movement.

Blake said he had conferred with Pope Paul VI in January only to have the pontiff deliver two “anti-Protestant speeches” in the days immediately following. Blake added in jest that he wondered whether he ought ever to undertake another Vatican visit.

It was disclosed in Memphis that the NCC had dispatched a seven-member team to Paris for four days in January to confer with peace-conference delegates from both North and South Viet Nam. In a report to the board they asserted that nationalism is “the driving spirit” in North and South, that “its dominance over every consideration is consistently present.” They charged that “the present regime in Saigon does not represent many important segments even of that part of South Viet Nam which it controls.” The report contended that the United States should encourage a third political force in South Viet Nam, opposed to both the present Saigon government and the Communist Viet Cong. This group obviously was not in Paris, and how the NCC representatives learned enough of such a phenomenon to promote it was not immediately clear.

The dejected mood of board members was perhaps inadvertently encouraged by the playing of blues records as prelude and postlude to a “service of praise and intercession” at the opening session. The selections were said to have been in recognition of the 150th anniversary in 1969 of the founding of the city of Memphis, where W. C. Handy wrote the famous “Beale Street Blues.”

To make matters worse, the board heard a none too encouraging financial report. President Arthur Flemming chided members for adopting idealistic goals and then failing to get their denominations to fund programs adequately. “I don’t want to be associated with organizations that just pass resolutions,” he said.

The gap was underscored by Mrs. James Dolbey, president of Church Women United, who said that unless denominations are willing to pool their resources for more joint action, “we should call it quits.”

Some orthodox notes managed to surface. An unsigned analysis of missionary work from the NCC’s Division of Overseas Ministries talked of the necessity of “an underlying and intentional spiritual purpose.” This reference to “spiritual” things drew criticism from one woman board member whose concept of religious relevance seemed to be confined to the materialist and activist dimension. Another board member hailed the emphasis, saying the words should be “underlined, italicized, and shouted from the rooftops.”

REMEMBERING DR. KING

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been 40 on January 15, and the day brought announcement of a “Memorial Center” for him in Atlanta. The two center sites—one near his Ebenezer Baptist Church, the second near the Atlanta University Center—will cost up to $40 million, from foundation, corporation, and private gifts. Meanwhile Governor Nelson Rockefeller and New York Mayor John Lindsay joined the campaign to make the fifteenth a national holiday, and Washington Cathedral said it would put a likeness of King next to its statues of Luther and Calvin. Also last month King’s widow was on a world tour. After a Vatican audience with Pope Paul, she praised U. S. Catholic efforts for racial justice, and backed non-violence. Then on to India, land of King’s idol Gandhi, to receive the Nehru Award for International Understanding in her husband’s name. Tears welled in Prime Minister’s Indira Gandhi’s eyes as Mrs. King sang, “We Shall Overcome.”

Memphis Trial Murmurs

The judge in the James Earl Ray murder trial says the Rev. James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference can’t join the defense counsel for Ray, accused of killing SCLC’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bevel, who asserted he knew that Ray didn’t do it, visited the defendant in prison last month as the Memphis trial got under way.

Episcopal Convergence

Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics in the U. S. Episcopal Church find their interests converging in opposition to church union and, in particular, the Consultation on Church Union. This, plus their adherence to the historic creeds and Episcopal liturgy, formed major themes of last month’s third convention of the Foundation for Christian Theology in New Orleans.

The foundation supports worthy causes within the denomination. Its Christian Challenge magazine, now seeking to upgrade its lackluster format, has grown to 20,000 circulation.

Broadcast Yeas And Nays

“Let your communication be yea, yea, nay, nay … anything more or less is evil,” admonished Federal Communications Commission Chairman Rosel H. Hyde to the annual National Religious Broadcasters convention in Washington, D. C., last month. Hyde, an FCC member since its inception in 1934, implored the 300 broadcasters from thirty-three states and four continents to sound a call to “reason … idealism, reverence, and moral standards” and noted approvingly President Nixon’s call to “stop shouting at one another.”

Other convention speakers observed that religious and other media are fast proliferating, sometimes duplicating efforts, and—occasionally—shouting at each other.

Mormon Hyde also declared radio and TV stations now carrying antismoking public-service ads would not be required to carry cigarette ads in order to show “fairness.”

Hyde himself has been the subject of fairness attacks. The week before the convention the FCC renewed without a hearing the TV license of Mormon Church-owned KSL in Salt Lake City. The six FCC members split evenly and bitterly on the issue. A cab-driving protester and his wife had charged—and KSL denied—that the station showed “dominant influence by the economic corporations” owned by the church.

“Pirate Bishop” A. W. Goodwin Hudson of London described the government stranglehold on religious broadcasts in Britain, where you can’t even buy air time to advertise sales of the Bible. What’s offered is “tepid religious rice pudding,” said the bishop caustically. The “pirate stations” on radio ships in international waters were squelched, after Hudson had successfully wafted the Gospel to merrie England, often in rock ‘n roll format.

RUSSELL CHANDLER

Vs. Church-State Sloganizing

Americans United for Separation of Church and State, whose monthly Church and State spends much time attacking alleged abuses of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, met for two days in New York last month. Speakers included separationists of various theological persuasions, from the Unitarian pastor Donald Harrington (who is president of New York’s Liberal party) to the National Association of Evangelicals’ Clyde W. Taylor.

Most speakers strongly condemned “increasing clericalism” and the use of public funds to support religion in any manner. But there was a moderate element represented by William Pinson, Jr., of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield, also a Baptist. Pinson stressed that in taking a stand for separation, Americans United should not forget that the “issues are too complex” for sloganizing. He warned those assembled against assuming an extremist posture that misuses freedom in terms of appeals to anti-Catholic prejudice, personal slander, and slanted reporting of events.

Hatfield’s keynote speech reiterated the need for positive statements by Americans United, to encourage people to practice their faith within the freedoms of the Bill of Rights. He defended the Supreme Court by saying it has allowed for more freedom of religion by its removal of particularized religion from the schools. “We’re not going to solve the secularism of the age with pious amendments to the Constitution,” said Hatfield. He thinks it’s time for those of faith to live by that faith by listening to the disadvantaged and projecting their faith with words and action into the now world.

JOHN EVENSON

Wesley’S Faith Rides Again

Those dissident Evangelical United Brethren who didn’t want to join the Methodists would have felt right at home at the first national evangelism council of the merged denomination last month in Kansas City. The meeting proved a kind of victory for United Methodists who desire an evangelical approach to mission.

Council President Ira Galloway, district superintendent from Fort Worth, said his own “theological stance is in the first decade.… The Gospel is still relevant. It works in our day. There is nothing wrong with the faith—we’ve left the faith as a people. Because of a lack of living faith, thousands of young people are turning from the Church.”

Galloway spoke of his own “coming to faith,” and criticized the secularist movement, which he considers heresy. “The pure secularist wants simply to share the affluence without also sharing the meaning of a personal relationship with God.”

The convention surpassed its registration goal of 400 by half again that many.

The delegates came from 117 of the 150 United Methodist conferences, at their own expense. Most delegates stayed in town over the weekend for a lay-witness mission. The original hope was that at least six laymen could be assigned to each area congregation for follow-up evangelism. As it worked out, some churches had twenty visiting lay witnesses, and one had fifty. Rarely had so many persons been involved in a denominational lay-witness program.

The Rev. George Fallon, a Board of Evangelism executive, contributed to the mood of the meeting by denying that God is dead or the Church obsolete.

“Man is trying to play God, and this contributes to a neurotic society,” added another Methodist evangelical speaker, Billy Graham associate Dr. Akbar Abdul-Haqq. And Alabama layman Charlie Phillips, district manager for an electrical equipment firm, spoke of his past life, “working real hard being a Christian, but without Christ.”

But such evangelistic pronouncements did not go unchallenged. General Secretary Joseph H. Yeakel of the evangelism board, who held the same post in the EUB Church, was more disturbed that men are living without Christ than that they are dying without him. He spoke of the “potential of the ecumenical,” and the Church’s need to listen to the world. “The Gospel is always social,” he concluded.

In other business, a resolution asking ministers to restrict their purchases from the Methodist Publishing House until it joins the fair-employment code of Project Equality failed to pass. And the Rev. Ford Philpot, well-known evangelical from Kentucky, was elected president of the National Association of Conference Evangelists.

JAMES S. TINNEY

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