Black Threats Move United Church of Christ

He looked like Michelangelo’s Moses standing there—bearded, shoulders tossed back, chest thrown out, fiery eyes threatening judgment on his audience of one thousand. But there were differences. The crusader here was black, his “religious” role less clear, his words forming demands rather than laws.

His name: James Forman, militant proponent of a “Black Manifesto” that has thrown America’s major Protestant denominations into turmoil since early May. His message: that the two-million-member United Church of Christ, meeting in Boston for its Seventh General Synod, should pay $140 million in “reparations” to underwrite such projects as black printing presses, a black university, black radio-TV networks, and a Southern land bank for cooperative farms.

Forman cast a beam or shadow (depending on one’s point of view) over nearly every session of the eight-day synod. Militant Albert Cleage, pastor of Detroit’s UCC Shrine of the Black Madonna, said blacks in the church support Forman’s goals.

“We’re all sinners and as sinners we’re talking about power,” Cleage said. “Nor am I being judgmental. If I had the power, I’d be dead set on keeping it, too. I understand this, but I don’t like it, because I’m powerless. In terms of self-interest you’d better make some changes, because a powerless people is a dangerous people.”

Apparently the predominantly white conference feared just that at first. For the most tense racial debate of the entire synod broke out on opening day, after several of the thirty-six black delegates had asked that the name of the UCC’s Board of World Ministries be removed from a court’s restraining order barring Forman from the Interchurch Center in New York. When the synod appeared ready to delay a response, more than 100 activists marched onto the platform, demanding immediate action.

The session recessed in pandemonium, then reassembled two hours later and agreed, narrowly, to the black demand. Black victories proved easier after that—though not in direct response to Forman himself.

The major one came five days later, with the decision to make the Committee for Racial Justice into a permanent commission and to guarantee blacks control of it. Delegates also voted it a minimum budget of about $1.5 million during the next three years.

Basic significance of this act, according to black-caucus chairman Edwin R. Edmonds, was to give the church’s 66,000 blacks a power base. “It’s a chance to deal with the needs peculiar to us,” he said. “We have unequivocally asserted that every group should have the right to determine its own destiny.”

The synod also urged the church boards to invest in black businesses, and voted to withdraw investments from firms doing business with the South African government and to study the feasibility of establishing a black university, of funding black publishing firms, and of setting up a Southern land bank.

Cleage, who had earlier told delegates, “I don’t really expect to get too much out of you,” said he was pleased and surprised by synod acts. He evoked laughter with an admission: “I honestly think you did more with Forman than black UCC congregations would have.”

Black victories did not extend, however, to the election of a successor to retiring president Ben Herbster. The black caucus (called UCC Ministers for Racial and Social Justice) put up a strong candidate, the Reverend Arthur Gray of Chicago. So did the United Churchmen for Change, a youth-oriented group that supported the Rev. Paul Gibbons, 36, of Cornell University.

Despite widespread prediction of a Gray victory, the nominating committee’s official choice—Dr. Robert V. Moss, 47, president of Lancaster Seminary, defeated Gray by nearly 200 votes, with Gibbons a distant third.

Few expected Moss to bring much change to the liberal denomination’s accelerating involvement in social action and ecumenism. During a vigorous campaign, he proposed:

• That the church “move ahead of society” in seeking the “equality of the races” as “the most pressing ethical, religious, and financial problem of our time.” Despite conflicting statements on how the church should react to Forman, he called the militant a prophet and said “several of his ideas” had merit.

• That on at least one Sunday a year UCC congregations replace holy communion with “some step toward reconciliation between blacks and whites.” He called this idea “Eucharistic fasting.”

• That ecumenism be pushed more at the local level, where “churches might get together more swiftly than on the national level.”

Non-black minority groups did not fare so well in the synod power struggle. Delegates from the Southwest lost an effort to include all “non-whites” on the racial justice commission, promoting a Colorado delegate to predict: “The browns will be here in force next synod.”

And the synod’s nine teenage delegates lost soundly in their drive to place Brian Wallwork, 18, of Massachusetts, on the executive council. Despite promises of greater youth representation at future gatherings, most of the nine grumbled loudly about paternalism and unresponsiveness.

The youths did, however, give the convention a zesty taste of the “now generation” that frequently left delegates abuzz. Flashbulbs popped, for example, when a mini-skirted girl walked to the platform to second Gibbon’s nomination; a Massachusetts group employed modern dance and satire in an eloquent plea for social activism; seminarians put out an irreverent daily called Balaam’s Ass; rock singers, presenting the story of UCC homeland ministries, left delegates clapping and shouting like worshipers at an old-time camp meeting.

Youth also showed enthusiasm over the synod’s major social pronouncements: approval of President Nixon’s attempts to end the Vietnamese war, support of draft-resisters, demands for selective-service reform, and, above all, a precedent-setting proposal that the United States give amnesty and pardon to persons jailed or “led by their conscience into exile” during the Viet Nam war.

On scattered occasions, delegates questioned what they saw as a greater emphasis on social than spiritual concern. “I’m for the social actions,” said a delegate on the final evening, “but I hope we haven’t forgotten that there’s also a spiritual gap. Are we aware that last year we lost 20,000 members—and 10,000 the year before?”

His motion that a committee study the decline and look into the evangelism methods used in the New Testament and by “other communions” passed narrowly.

Free Methodist Vitality

Just twenty-six years ago the Free Methodists decided individual churches could begin using pianos or organs (not both!) in worship services. Today—as indicated by their recent quinquennial general conference at Winona Lake, Indiana—they have become the fastest growing, perhaps the most adaptive, of the Wesleyan-Arminian (“holiness”) denominations.

During the past five years worldwide membership grew, at about 3 per cent a year, to nearly 125,000. The growth, said Bishop Myron F. Boyd, stems from “twenty-five years of breaking barriers of legalism until we have finally begun doing a real redemptive task.”

Some of the conference’s most soul-searching attempts at adaptation came in the area of social concern. Taking a new, if somewhat halting, step, delegates confessed church-wide “guilt” for a failure to “adequately lift the burdens of the disadvantaged,” then established a commission to spur local congregations into greater inter-racial, cross-cultural involvement throughout the next five years.

Said Bishop Paul N. Ellis of the move: “This general conference has demonstrated awareness of the social issues of our world to a degree unprecedented in the past thirty years.” He praised delegates for evidencing “sensitivity and repentance for sins of omission in relation to the demands of love’s law.”

Adaptation also prompted a cautious though positive step toward merger with another “holiness” group, the 85,000-member Wesleyan Church. Despite a slight lessening of strong “merger-now” winds that seemed to sweep both churches a year ago, the conference acted to continue conversations and to take concrete steps toward merger—without making a final commitment.

Reason for the new caution: many Wesleyans feel seriously bogged down in the problems of working out their own 1968 merger (Wesleyan Methodist-Pilgrim Holiness), while Free Methodists appear hesitant to jeopardize the fruits of a recent administrative reorganization, which they think has helped spark their new growth.

In other actions, the conference:

• Elected South Michigan conference superintendent W. Dale Cryderman as bishop in place of retiring Bishop Walter S. Kendall.

• Gave special attention to a mushrooming missions program. Overseas membership grew 15 per cent in the last two years and now makes up almost 45 per cent of the church.

• Approved a “strategy commission” report aimed at making the church more human and less institutional, “more concerned with dynamics than with mechanics.”

• Elected a Japanese, the Rev. Take-saburo Uzaki, vice-president of the Free Methodist World Fellowship. Ellis was elected president.

The Free Methodist Church of North America grew out of a movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church more than a century ago. The movement had its roots in western New York State.

JAMES HUFFMAN

Evangelism In The Arpc

Meeting in the aftermath of presbytery rejection of a proposed new constitution, the General Synod of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church adopted a one-year moratorium on constitutional amendments and endorsed a three-year emphasis on evangelism. The court met at Bonclarken, its conference center in the North Carolina mountains.

Included among the changes in the rejected document was the ordination of women as ministers, elders, and deacons.

The 1970–72 emphasis on evangelism was enthusiastically endorsed after the synod heard from some of its leaders who participated in clinics at Fort Lauderdale’s Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, fastest-growing congregation of a sister denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. The Florida church’s principles of lay witness will be stressed in the ARPC program.

Erskine Seminary at Due West, South Carolina, was asked by the synod to include training in the Coral Ridge type of evangelism in the schedules of its rising seniors. A proposal to move the seminary from its present campus to an unspecified urban setting was defeated, but the court approved the possibility of some urban studies for the students.

On another front, the synod made it clear that it believes “ecumenical” can mean relations with conservative as well as liberal brethren. It voted down the recommendation of its ecumenical-relations committee that it quit the Reformed Ecumenical Synod. It also opened the way for fraternal relations with these bodies: the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Christian Reformed Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. The ARPC is also a member of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and has fraternal relations with the other alliance members in the United States.

A litany emphasizing social concerns was rejected by the court, as was a recommendation calling for creation of a new social-action committee.

ARTHUR H. MATTHEWS

Here is a roundup of reports from church conventions in North America with highlights of developments from each:

Two small denominations with Scottish Presbyterian roots were merged last month. One of the parties to the union, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, dates back to the Covenanters in Reformation times. The other, the Associate Presbyterian Church of North America, grew out of the 1733 Secession Movement in the Church of Scotland. They came together at a joint meeting on the campus of Geneva College, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

Delegates to the eighty-fourth annual meeting of the Evangelical Covenant Church voted to seek to raise $335,000 in reparations to black Americans. A resolution adopted at the meeting in Chicago said that while the church was not in sympathy with either the spirit or the language of the Black Manifesto, the “covenant has a responsibility before God and all men to help lift the burden of indignity imposed on the black communities.”

“Revolutionary Christianity” was the theme of the annual assembly of the 50,640-member Baptist Convention of Ontario and Quebec—but little was revolutionary about it. A motion that would have permitted the convention to apply for membership in the World Council of Churches was rejected. The meeting was held in Leamington, Ontario. Dr. Stuart Barber, a Dundas, Ontario, surgeon, was elected convention president.

A youth burned what he said was his 1-A draft classification card last month at the annual conference of the Church of the Brethren, held in Louisville, Kentucky. The act took place during a discussion of whether the historic peace denomination should give draft-resisters the same support it gives to conscientious objectors. The 1,037 delegates also talked at length about black reparations and voted to start a fund for “all disadvantaged minorities.”

A missionary report presented to the eighty-fifth general conference of the Evangelical Free Church told of spiritual revival in the northwest corner of the Republic of Congo. The report stated that more than 6,000 Congolese were received into the church as members in the past year. The phenomenon was said to be a continuation of the spiritual awakening that has been felt in that part of the Congo since 1960. A home-front report given at the conference showed the Evangelical Free Church as now having 533 congregations with a membership total of 59,014.

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