Ecumenical Showdown for Southern Presbyterians

Southern Presbyterian conservatives claimed a major victory last month when the denomination’s presbyteries voted down measures to permit piecemeal merger with the more liberal United Presbyterians. Hopes rose, meanwhile, for presbytery approval of a plan of union, with the smaller, theologically conservative Reformed Church in America.

The defeated amendments to the Form of Government of the 960,000-member Presbyterian Church in the U. S. would have authorized local presbyteries and regional synods to unite with corresponding units of the 3,–300,000-member United Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A. Opponents saw the proposals as a backdoor merger plan. A full-fledged effort to bring together the nation’s two biggest Presbyterian bodies was tried in the mid-fifties and failed.

Not all presbyteries have yet voted, but more than enough have already turned down the amendments to assure defeat. President Kenneth S. Keyes of the conservative Concerned Presbyterians hailed the defeat as a sign that “when informed regarding issues which vitally affect the future of the Church, ruling elders as well as ministers will assume their responsibilities and vote their convictions.” Keyes called upon the 1969 General Assembly to follow up the decision by recognizing “the futility of continuing our participation in the Consultation on Church Union.”

The COCU matter is one of a number that complicate the other key question in the current poll of presbyteries: whether Southern Presbyterians should merge with the 377,000-member RCA. With six of the seventy-seven presbyteries still to cast ballots, the vote at the beginning of March stood at 53–18 in favor. An affirmative vote from fifty-eight presbyteries, plus ratification by the General Assembly, is necessary for union.

On the RCA side, a two-thirds vote of the forty-five regional units known as classes is needed for merger. Early returns showed a 9–2 margin for approval.

What considerations are influencing the vote? Among Southern Presbyterians, most observers agree there is no one overriding issue. The most discernible pattern is that presbyteries opposing the RCA merger are clustered in traditionally conservative areas of the Old South (see map).

The voting has produced strange bedfellows, however, and some strongly conservative presbyteries have come out in favor of the merger. A number of liberals, on the other hand, have sided with conservatives who oppose merger. Said one churchman after he had cast his ballot at a presbytery meeting, “That’s the last time we vote together.”

Liberals against the merger feel it will delay and perhaps even prevent union with United Presbyterians or COCU. Some liberals contend that a Southern Presbyterian-RCA union will produce a theology too narrow for them.

Conservatives who oppose the RCA merger point to a much greater assortment of reasons. They fear theological integrity will be sacrificed in the writing of a new confession for the merged church. They are also considerably troubled that the plan of union does away with deacons and lowers ordination standards. Some feel that merger is undesirable because the RCA is relatively small, yet geographically spread out.

In one presbytery that defeated the measure by a very narrow margin, the ministers and laymen voted as separate blocs almost to a man.

An unusual provision in the plan of union that would permit individual congregations to withdraw from the merged denomination after a year’s trial has not had as much effect as many had expected. Congregations at odds with the denominational agencies were expected to jump at the chance to get out. But the strongest objections to the merger are being recorded in presbyteries where conservative dissatisfaction has been acute. Some conservatives are wary of the “escape hatch,” and have voiced concern that legally the move would be too tricky to chance.

Some Southern Presbyterian conservatives obviously see the RCA merger as a means of strengthening their ecclesiastical position. The RCA does not participate in COCU, and a coalition of conservatives could keep the merged church out of it. Both denominations, however, belong to the National and World Councils of Churches.

World Vision’S New Chief

The Rev. W. Stanley Mooneyham, who says his “heart interest” is in the Orient, gained a big chance to do something about it last month when he was named president of the enterprising World Vision International, an evangelical welfare organization having its principal work in the East.

At 43, Mooneyham already has an impressive list of evangelical credentials, among them direction of the big 1966 World Congress on Evangelism in Berlin. After that job his pace was slowed by an ailing heart. But proof that he has fully recovered from that was seen in November when he coordinated the Asia-South Pacific Congress on Evangelism—there undoubtedly laying a good foundation for his service at World Vision, which begins July 1.

Currently overseas vice-president of the Billy Graham team, Mooneyham early in his career became the youngest moderator of the Free Will Baptists. Since then he has also been editor of United Evangelical Action of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Concord At Concordia?

Student protest came in a big way to the world’s biggest Lutheran seminary, Concordia at St. Louis. During an assembly last month, the more than 600 students voted to ask the fifty-five teachers and administrators to call a three-day moratorium on classes to join with students to discuss grievances.

The moratorium was held off one week, then called despite some strenuous faculty objections. On opening day seminary President Alfred Fuerbringer and two students laid down guidelines for the two dozen “buzz sessions” at a general meeting: no holds barred, no forbidden subjects, but a confrontation between Christian brothers.

Students considered more than 100 resolutions, adopted twenty-five, and kept the others for further study. They called for sweeping top-to-bottom changes in seminary program and structure. The faculty agreed to consider the ideas, implement as many as possible now and others later, and present valid reasons if recommendations aren’t followed.

Students think too many courses have “no current relevance or practical application,” too many courses are required, and too few electives are allowed. There is little chance for small-group guided research, they say. Also, faculty salaries are so small that some teachers moonlight to make ends meet and are not available to students for counseling. Students themselves hope to start an endowment fund to hike pay and to solicit funds from families, friends, and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which owns and runs the school.

The students also expressed strong preference for pass/fail grading in place of the “unfair and inhuman” system of A,B,C,D,F. The third-year student internships under a parish pastor may be broadened to include such alternatives as the Urban Training Center in Chicago.

When it was all over, Missouri Synod President Oliver R. Harms said, “We have had a fine Christian confrontation at Concordia, and when the membership of the church at large knows the facts, they will approve of what has been done here.” He said some student proposals would be implemented, some “tabled indefinitely.” Fourth-year student David Yagow said students won’t let the proposals “lie in somebody’s basket to die,” and the seminarians hope for regular dialogues with the faculty.

Second-year student Richard Koehneke commented, “I feel that a paternalistic system, by which the seminary was operated, has apparently been replaced by a fraternalistic system, and I am encouraged by the progress we have made—though I wish it might have been more.”

Neither students nor faculty have issued threats to date. But the students have made it clear that if a substantial number of their demands are not met they will be heard from again.

CHARLES M. BUNCE

Strike At Stillman

The wave of student disorder moved into the Deep South last month, landing at Presbyterian-related Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

At the heart of the furor, said President Harold N. Stinson of the predominantly Negro college, is an attempt by the militant Black Student Alliance to gain control of the student body from the student government association. “We have noted a great deal of missionary work being done by the BSA,” said Stinson.

This, coupled with whatever movement there was beneath the surface, sparked a subsequent boycott of classes and a student strike. Students presented Stinson with fifteen demands, including:

Firing of a security officer who wounded a student during Thanksgiving holidays and was later transferred to the maintenance department; dismissal or reprimanding of certain faculty members; hiring of at least one professor with a doctoral degree in every department; hiring of more instructors; inclusion of students on faculty evaluation committees; improvement of living quarters and food services; relaxed rules on dormitories and off-campus living; a Negro faculty counselor; and amnesty for all students in the boycott.

This disorder came to a head when students took over the administration building. They left for a Friday-night basketball game on campus. But before the game could begin, a large number of students sat on the gymnasium floor, and the game was canceled. For an inexplicable reason, the students did not return to the administration building.

Stinson officially closed the college Sunday morning and gave students until 1 P.M. the following day to leave the campus. But days later more than fifty students were still occupying the student center.

In November, Stillman got approval from the General Council of the Southern Presbyterian Church to launch a $2.25 million capital-improvement fund drive sometime this year.

In Birmingham, the 325 students at African Methodist-related Daniel Payne College also launched a boycott of classes February 25 over problems they said they would not reveal because they might injure staff reputations. Students say if their demands aren’t met, things “will get a little more dramatic.” The college is in the midst of relocation plans to make way for city airport expansion.

WALLACE HENLEY

Moody Church’S Survival Plan

Most congregations aim their message at a homogenous public: rich, poor, or middle; black, white, or yellow. With a little wit and a lot of prayer, a comfortable method can usually be devised to reach that public, and the pastor and staff are home free.

It used to be that way at famed Moody Memorial Church, a vast pile of brick and mortar on Chicago’s Near North Side. It was established smack in the middle of a then-prosperous middle-class neighborhood. They loved the gospel message of such greats as Dwight L. Moody himself, Torrey, Rader, Philpott, and Ironside.

For today’s pastor, 44-year-old George Sweeting, little is easy in the church’s pantheon of ministries. Time and change have eroded the old public and washed up five new ones, each playing hard-to-get:

• Tenants of rather luxurious high-rise apartments built by urban-renewal benificence.

• The rapidly growing Negro population in public housing, locale of some violent rioting in the past year.

• Young junior executives and secretaries who live (sometimes together) in high-rises or renovated walkups.

• A few old-timers who moved to the suburbs when these revolutions were beginning a few years ago and have returned to work (but not live) where the action is.

• Old Town, which stretches around the church with its far-out night spots and its mixed bag of tourist and suburbanite visitors, pot-smokers, artists, entertainers, and alienated youth.

Sweeting, who succeeded the Rev. Alan Redpath two years ago, has designs on all five publics but so far has programs only for the first four.

“We have had to go slowly, keeping experiments at a minimum, until the church can be built up further. Later, when a solid base of attendance, membership, and finance is established, we will be able to try many new things, whether they work or not.”

But if Sweeting hadn’t tried something the church might be dark and desolate by now. Sunday-evening evangelistic services drew as few as 250 persons to a sanctuary that seats 4,250. Now the typical evening attendance is 1,500, and membership has climbed to 1,700.

Sweeting’s first innovation was no eyebrow-raiser and a bit corny, a church slogan and attitude: “Where old-fashioned friendliness survives.” Apparently folksiness catches on in the lonely city.

The church vowed “to have everything really top-drawer. Mediocrity was out.” It kept the teaching-evangelistic balance with Sunday-morning Bible messages followed by evening evangelism with various forms of invitations to receive Christ.

To crack the high-rise barrier (doormen are polite to pastors but give them the same treatment as tradesmen), the church rented a directory from a mail-order advertiser. Each week it mails out 200 or so soft-sell notices about the church, drawing maybe a dozen responses. One who replied, a 27-year-old engineer who had left his family, later professed faith and now sings in the choir.

For 170 young adults, there are clubs, and evening biblical discussions on topics like Viet Nam, civil disobedience, the Playboy philosophy, and the pros and cons of Sweeting’s sermons.

The church has only a dozen black members (there were just two when Sweeting came), but close to a fourth of the 850 Sunday school students are black. Sweeting thinks many white inner-city churches that feel they can’t have a big Sunday school are really afraid of blacks. “I think our church is prepared to accept more Negroes, though not everyone feels that way, I’m sure.” But with board backing he preaches for an inclusive congregation, with James 2:9 as text.

One problem: blacks in public housing are as hard to reach by visitation as white cliffhangers. “They tell me that in the past the only whites who came were those trying to collect bills or reclaim TV sets.”

For Old Town, Sweeting envisions “a select, trained group capable of communicating” with the types there. One asset is his interest in art. He has in his background a year of study at the Art Institute of Chicago, along with more predictable educational credentials from Moody Bible Institute, Gordon College, Northern Baptist Seminary, Biblical Seminary in New York, and New York University. Sweeting has been a pastor in Hawthorne, Passaic, and Paterson, New Jersey, and spent a decade as a traveling evangelist.

Now he hopes to help Moody Church again chart the way for evangelicals caught in the throes of a changing city. The prospect is frightening, but can be fruitful.

WESLEY HARTZELL

‘Black Power’ In Asia

Black power, often linked with racial hatred in the United States, is taking on an altogether different hue in Asia—at least the type of black power evangelist Robert Emanuel Harrison is promoting. Instead of incensing men, it teaches them to love one another. Harrison’s appeal is attracting crowds of up to 20,000 persons. Even in Surabaja, a Muslim city of two million that hadn’t seen a public evangelist since 1935, some 2,000 Indonesians made decisions for Christ.

Everywhere scarfaced (he was quite a street fighter as a kid) Harrison preaches, yellow-and brown-skinned Asians warm up to him. If it’s not the preaching that wins them over, it’s his singing talent. Few can resist his inimitable style in singing Negro folk songs and spirituals. Here, the big, athletic black man reaches them in the heart, singing and telling it like it is.

“Bob,” as they call him, can’t tell it any other way. He hates phoniness, and people sense it. As one observer put it, “He likes anyone who acts like himself.”

The ten-year veteran of evangelism, who was preacher—choir director—janitor at a small evangelical church in California before meeting Billy Graham in 1958, rose quickly from then on as an evangelist. He held his first city-wide campaign in Germany, where he was a curiosity. After he made evangelistic sallies into most of the European countries, Graham signed him up as a member of his team. Six years later, Harrison went with Overseas Crusades. He has attracted huge crowds in nearly every Asian country from Japan to Viet Nam, and in Oceania’s archipelagos. In the Philippines he has a large television audience.

Harrison wants Asians to develop a spiritual power of their own. He realizes that his dark skin puts him across much better than white skin would, and he knows Asians and the islanders can do a forceful job among their own if they will take up the task. To help this along, he is mapping seminars and long-range evangelism strategy.

Music opens Asia’s hearts, and Harrison is moving to develop local talent for Christ’s cause. Asians, he feels, have a keen aptitude for music, and this must be harnessed for the ministry.

For whatever reasons, the San Franciscan who once fought going into the ministry packs a lot of power. His message, coming from a black man not very different from Asians, attracts attention and empathy among the continent’s suffering and needy millions.

EUSTAQUIO RAMIENTOS, JR.

Defusing Church Disputes

Using the recent Blue Hull Memorial Presbyterian Church decision (see February 14 issue) as its springboard, the U. S. Supreme Court flipped touchy church-property cases back to Ohio and Maryland courts, telling them to abandon their earlier rulings and keep hands off internal church affairs.

The Maryland and Virginia Eldership of the Churches of God asked relief from a state ruling giving control of church property to two breakaway churches. Maryland ruled the majority of a congregation is entitled to own, use, and control local church property when it votes to withdraw from the mother church. Even though a denomination may be hierarchical in structure, Maryland law vests the title to property in local assemblies, not the denomination.

In Akron, St. Demetrius Serbian Orthodox Church refused to accept the bishop designated by the mother church in Yugoslavia, bolted, and by majority vote laid claim to the property. The Ohio court said the Akronites were in schism—although the mother church had not yet gone that far—and ruled in favor of the parent body. The dissidents claimed Ohio had no right to pass judgment on what constitutes schism.

So, too, the Supreme Court. But now that the state ruling has been ordered vacated, the mother church may be able to make good her insistence that the dissidents vacate the church also.

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